Re: [Errno 28] No space left on device

[ewl+rdiffbackup]

Hi,

On 14/11/2019 01:47, Yves Bellefeuille wrote:
> > 3. which file system type you are using to backup?
> Backing-up from NTFS (Windows 7) to ext4.

Cross-filesystem-types backup is always a bit tricky. This said if you 
have the occasion, it would be nice to test the latest version from 
master. We could use some real life testers.

> > 4. do you also get the issue if you use the `--no-eas` option?
> Indeed, this seems to have solved the problem.
>
> I wonder why this suddenly failed after working for several years.
> Thanks for the help.

Here I can possibly offer you an explanation: according to man 5 xattr, 
the ext4 file system has a limit of extended attributes size (1, 2 or 
4KB), and you might have now a Windows file with bigger EAs, which leads 
to the issue:

touch xxx
python3
>>> x = '0123456789' * 1024  # 10KB size
>>> import xattr
>>> xattr.setxattr('xxx', 'user.comment', x)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

So you have multiple solutions:

1. switch from ext4 to XFS, which doesn't know this limit (I checked)
2. identify the culprit file and trim the EAs (somehow?!?)
3. use the --no-eas option, not knowing what you lose as information

I created an issue against pyxattr: 
https://github.com/iustin/pyxattr/issues/23

Hope this helps,
Eric