Doesn't delete old backups

[Michael Terry]

I am running Natty and backing up my home partition daily to a NAS drive mounted as an SMB share. Backups have been working fine, but I have run out of space on the drive because Deja is not removing old archives even though I have set it to only keep two months worth. Any ideas?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Do you see a printed message like "Operation not supported" when backing up if you run deja-dup from a Terminal? I suspect this is because some NAS drives over SMB don't report how much free space there is.

For example, see bug 657518 where we had a previous problem that Deja Dup assumed zero space available if the NAS didn't report any. Now we assume there is space, just to let you continue.

To test if this is the case for you, can you report the results of the following?

sudo apt-get install gvfs-bin
gvfs-info -f smb://blargblarg

[pjaikins (pjaikins)]

I mount with the following in my fstab file:

//10.0.0.3/backup /mnt/backup_nas cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Here are the results of your commands after I unmounted and remounted with gvfs-mount.

gvfs-info -f smb://10.0.0.3/backup
attributes:
  filesystem::size: 3935715090432
  filesystem::free: 1597364006912
  filesystem::type: cifs
  filesystem::readonly: FALSE
  gvfs::backend: smb-share

[Dahaniel (dm-protzkeule)]

Here is what I get:

daniel@Edge-PiffPaff:~$ gvfs-info -f smb://192.168.24.1/fritz.nas/WD-5000AAKSExterna-01/Backup
attributes:
  filesystem::type: cifs
  gvfs::backend: smb-share

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Dahaniel, your problem is that your NAS does not report how much space is left. So Deja Dup can't do anything particularly clever there.

pjaikins, your problem is probably related to the fact that you are mounting it via fstab. I don't have much experience doing things that way. Let me do more testing.

[Reinout van Schouwen (reinouts)]

I backup to a network share that has a lot of free space. But still as one of the many users I am expected to limit the amount of data I store. Currently my backups are 17GB in size and growing. How do I limit this?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

One way to limit it is to tell Deja Dup it can delete older backups after a certain amount of time. It's a setting on the "Schedule" tab of the preferences.

[Rikkie (2-launch-m)]

hi, i have a simular problem. I use Ubuntu One as backup Medium. With only enough space (in the free 5GB version) for one full backup. I choice the options keep backup for atleast one week, and making a daily backup. But when the backup starts again, after the first run, it will just start coping and after some time stops with a message that the the disk is full. So actually it should first check for enough disk space and if it is not there create it by deleting the older backup. Deja is not doing that right now.

I installed deja-dup as package of unbuntu, giving me version 20.1.

[Dennis Stone (dennis-infomaniak)]

I have another version of this problem: my NAS shows the free space of the entire volume, but still enforces the quota I set for backups, so deja-dup sees lots of free space and doesn't delete old backups, but when it starts uploading it is refused and exits with the "no space left" error message.

gvfs-info -f smb://backup@diskstation/Backup/
attributes:
  filesystem::size: 979736653824
  filesystem::free: 205893955584
  filesystem::type: cifs
  filesystem::readonly: FALSE
  gvfs::backend: smb-share

As you can see, the NAS is a synology diskstation (which doesn't allow me to resize volumes, so I'm stuck here). It would be cool if deja-dup deletes the old backups when it has an upload error instead of relying only on the free space.

I'm running deja-dup 22.0 on Ubuntu 12.04LTS 64bit.

[DeadVirus (amfcosta13)]

As a test, I'm using a simple folder on my internal disk to store the backups.
I can see two full backups, one of them done more than one month ago. In deja dup I have it set to backup every 2 days and delete backups older than 1 month, but the backup made more than one month ago is still there.

[Pacho Ramos (pacho)]

I also suffer the same problem locally, my backup storage is full for months and dejadup fails to backup due that problem even if it's a local ext3 partition:

/dev/sdc1 on /media/disco1 type ext3 (rw)