So a while ago, some time at close of business, I was doing some final tests for the fourth phase of project achilles when all of a sudden, I’ve been struck with some random mysql errors. “Data source not available” and other similar errors with other etc.
This is some crazy s#it which I didn’t need, deadlines coming at me left, right and centre, this is the last thing you want!
I thought it may have been a memory issue so I did a du:
du -s * | sort -nr | head
This reported that my fricking hard disk was full!!!!
How? why?! … HOW?!?!?
Simple backup (sbackup)
Rewind back to a few weeks before this happened, I implemented a backup solution called “sbackup” (installed via $sudo aptitude install sbackup). I had it set up to do the following:
- Target backup drive was an external USB drive I hook up daily to my LG S900 laptop desktop replacement – Ubuntu auto mounts this drive to “/media/disk”
- I backup my home directory and etc directories.
- I have it scheduled to do an incremental back up every day at 5pm
- I have it scheduled to do a full backup every week.
- I have it set to “Abort backup if destination directory does not exist”
A few weeks before the event, I had been working from home and worked through the afternoon. My backup drive was left on my desk at the office so it was not connected. _THIS _ was the problem!
What sbackup did was ignore the “Abort backup if destination directory does not exist” setting in the GUI and had actually created a backup directory called “disk” in “/media”. Due to this, the following happened:
- From that day forward, sbackup did incremental and full backups locally to my hard disk slowly filling it up.
- Whenever I connected my backup drive, it was mounted as “/media/disk-1″ so it was never touched.
sbackup was ignoring the “Abort backup if destination directory does not exist” checkbox option.
Inspecting the sbackup configuration file, I found that the config variable that stores this was set to 0 (meaning “no”) rather than 1! That’s terrible. A suggested workaround was to manually change this setting in the configuration file, but every time you load up the gui and make changes, it gets reset to 0 again. Absolute BS!
I’ve done some digging around and sbackup is now abandonware. The developers who created it originally are now focussing on not so simple backup suite. Which does not seem to have the abort if destination does not exist option.
I’ve installed nssbackup, but have it set to manual. Hopefully the guys developing this project will at least implement the “abort backup if destination directory does not exist” option. I’ve asked the question “ability to abort backup if destination directory does not exist?” on launchpad anyway and will post an update if I get an answer or not.
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I tried sbackup today and had the same result. But the major problem I have is I can not find where the file is in my / folder. I have / and /home on different partitions.
How can I find the offending file and get rid of it?
@mr. ubuntu for me, the files were stacking up in the directory I specified as the backup directory.
If you decided to go with the default, I think the location was /var/backup.
Try looking there.
Good luck man. Let us know how you fair out.
hi there, read your Interesting comments. In fact I had the same problem with having the file system full, couldn’t find a goood reason for that… a 55gigs hdisk and only 10gigs in my home. So I started to remove the backups, but this was Not the problem… it keeps on telling me there is not enough space… and partition doesn’t show any error… mum…
Has anyone a clue of where I should be looking for ? Mny tks.
I had the same problem and found my solution here http://www.blog.arun-prabha.com/2008/07/22/deleting-files-from-roots-trash-folder-in-ubuntu/.
Apparently when the network share drive fails to mount due to the fstab problem (network not up, drive will not mount), sBackup creates the backup in your root folder. The procedure at this site outline the steps to clear the hidden backup folder/file then describes how to delete them from the root Trash folder. I just cleared up 22 Gib of reported space. Kudos to Arun Subramanian’s Blog (Deleting files from root’s trash folder in Ubuntu)!
I hope this helps
It doesn’t look like there’s a particularly current release of NSsbackup that contains the fix for this. In case you’re still interested, I fixed my sbackup GUI simply by fixing the typos in lines 1013-1014 of (/usr/share/sbackup/) simple-backup-config.py: replace both occurrences of ‘on_stop_if_not_target_checkbox_toggled’ to ‘on_stop_if_no_target_checkbox_toggled’.
I needed this option (which can of course simply be set by editing the /etc/sbackup.conf file) as I backup both to the default destination (/var/backup) and a networked drive (that is itself backup up every night!) that may not be mounted.