Deja Dup uses ~/.cache without telling user and fills home 100%

[Henning Sprang]

when having a separate, small home partition, deja dup stops running at some point, telling the user there's not enough space on the destintation directory(screenshot), even though there is a lot of space left.

When analyzing the problem, i found that deja dup seems to use ~/cache/deja-dup to store large amounts of data, probably as cache before writing them to the final destination directory.
So, when I have a /home of only about 10GB, but want to backup a data partition with some 200GB, the process stops at some time, even though I have more than 400GB left on the destination folder, and I found that ~/.cache/deja-dup is filled with more than 4GB, leading to fill /home 100%.

I guess solutions to improve would be

* the error message must tell the user that the missing space is not missing on the final destination directory, but in the cache directory
* deja-dup scans the whole data to backup before it starts working, so after doing this it might also be able to predict how big the cache dir must be and warn this user that the space is not enough
* enable to configure this caching directory (duplicity's archive-dir?) somehow (workaround would be a symlink to a bigger partition)

Some info:

henning@roady:~$ dpkg-query -W deja-dup duplicity
deja-dup 14.2-0ubuntu0.1
duplicity 0.6.08b-0ubuntu2

henning@roady:~$ lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS

Sorry but I didn't find the time yet to try workarounds, or trying with a newer version, but I need a backup soon, and the whole process until the crash comes takes 2 hours or so, and I already had 3 failed attempts - I'm trying to use plain duplicity now...

[Yuriy Voziy (yuretsz)]

This behaviour makes program unusable for backupping /home directory, which is full > 50%in most times.

[Henning Sprang (henning)]

Hi,

Why do you do this?

I don't see that "filling user's home dir with large amounts of data
without announcing this ti the user" be the same as not checking for
free space.

Sure, no question the latter is a must have. Still, also a program that
will make large data dumps -somewhere- must tell this toi the user
_before_ doing so. even if that happens on a large dik with 100G free
space and after it it is still 50, I want to know that before and not
wonder by acident some days later why my disk is so full.

Please undo the bug merge, it's not correct IMHO.

On 06/07/2011 03:10 PM, Michael Terry wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 403109 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/403109
>
> ** This bug has been marked a duplicate of bug 403109
> Doesn't check for free space in archive dir when backing up
>

--
Henning Sprang EDV Schulung und Beratung
Phone: [phone]
WWW: http://www.sprang.de

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Did you actually read the other bug? It describes the same problems (filling hard drive and no notification that ~/.cache will be so consumed). It also suggests the same fixes, like checking for space before starting and allowing to configure directory.

[Henning Sprang (henning)]

I Read the other, but probably I didn't read mine again.

From thinking about it I realize, I don't want to only check for space.

I want to be explicitly notfied that a program will create large amounts
of data for such a backup, and as a user I want to be asked if I really
want that, and that I can chose a special location for this data
alternatively.

Henning

On 06/09/2011 02:33 PM, Michael Terry wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 403109 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/403109
>
> Did you actually read the other bug? It describes the same problems
> (filling hard drive and no notification that ~/.cache will be so
> consumed). It also suggests the same fixes, like checking for space
> before starting and allowing to configure directory.
>

--
Henning Sprang EDV Schulung und Beratung
Phone: [phone]
WWW: http://www.sprang.de