Try to use a tempdir on same partition as source files

[Federico Mena Quintero]

Déjà Dup calls Duplicity with no information about the directory to use for temporary files. So, Duplicity tries to use /tmp, and the backup is aborted when /tmp runs out of space.

This is a patch-in-progress to add the capability to pass the "--tempdir" option to duplicity. For now it is only the gsettings key and the code to pass that option to Duplicity; there is no GUI for this yet. Maybe it should go in the "Storage" tab in Déjà Dup's UI.

Opinions appreciated :)

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Hmm. This seems like a really nitty-gritty part of the Backup to be customizing.

I wonder if a better solution isn't to try to use a tempdir on the same partition as the files to be backed up or restored. That is, for the common case, something like ~/.cache/deja-dup/tmp. That way, we'd only have out-of-space issues if we were going to hit such issues with the restore anyway.

The only bummer with such a plan is cleaning out the tempdir if we get interrupted. Maybe the deja-dup-monitor program could clean it out on startup if it sees it and no deja-dup program is already running...

(I assume this is prompted by Fedora 18's use of tmpfs?)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "deja-dup-tmpdir.diff" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

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[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package deja-dup - 25.5-0ubuntu1

---------------
deja-dup (25.5-0ubuntu1) raring; urgency=low

  * New upstream release
    - Use same partition for temp files as include files (to avoid problems
      with tiny /tmp partitions like tmpfs). LP: #1100092
    - Tell GNOME 3 about notifications, so the user can disable them
    - Always exclude /run (in case user includes /)
  * debian/rules:
    - Be explicit about what features we turn on (ccpanel, nautilus, unity)
  * debian/control:
    - Require duplicity 0.6.21
 -- Michael Terry <email address hidden> Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:12:32 -0500

[Robin (robingape)]

The temporary directory needs to be user settable. One size fits all is not working. Déjà-dup runs, and if the desktop is open at the time, a brief message is displayed. There may also be a desktop notification to be seen, but both of these are easily missed. There is no log file associated with the Déjà-dup control GUI. The control GUI does not note that any backups have failed. Effectively, backups fail silently.

Should a new bug be raised for this silent failure?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Robin, do you mind filing a new bug? Will be easier for me to dig into what's not working for you, rather than adding on to this 2013 issue. Thanks.