Re: [Errno 28] No space left on device

[Walt Mankowski]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 09:01:43AM +0000, Dominic Raferd wrote:
> Unexpected out of space errors often (or even usually) relate to the
> temporary file location. Try increasing the space in this location or
> specifying a different one using rdiff-backup's --tempdir or
> --remote-tempdir options. Regressions (which are attempted automatically by
> rdiff-backup if it finds a damaged repository) are especially
> temp-intensive. I have a 60GB SSD entirely dedicated to /tmp.

I had a similar problem a few months ago. In my case the problem was
that one of the directories I was backing up was Chrome's cache
directory. The files were relatively short lived, but they had
basically random filenames and there were new ones every day. After
several years of this I had millions of files in one of one of
rdiff-backup's control directories.

It turns out that by default there's a limit to how big a directory
can get in ext4. When you reach that limit and try to add another file
to that directory you get an out of disk error.

Look through the mailing list archives for more information.

Walt