tries to creat a fresh backup when there isn't enough space

[Cole Robinson]

Fedora 16, deja-dup-20.2-2.fc18.x86_64 (from rawhide, but affects f16 deja-dup-18.1)

deja-dup keeps trying to create a fresh backup when there isn't enough space at the backup location. I'm backing up about 250 GB of data to a 450 GB drive. Which presumably should be fine with incremental backups.

Then after a few weeks deja-dup wants to kick off a fresh backup. It chew through CPU for hours until finally filling up the drive and erroring with 'No space left'. Next back up period, deja-dup cleans up the abadoned backup, freeing a bunch of space, then goes through the same 'fresh' process, failing again. Changing retention from 1 week through 6 months didn't seem to affect the next backup, it still wanted a 'fresh' one.

There are a few sub optimal parts here:

1) This constant failure means I haven't had an actual backup for a week.
2) Despite the retention policy saying something about 'or until backup is low on disk space' deja-dup still overruns space requirements, then bails, and doesn't even try an incremental backup afterwards
3) No way to skip or disable the 'fresh' backup step (maybe a gconf key to force it off?)

[Vej (vej)]

Marking this as "Won't Fix", because we intentionally ensure, that there are always two full-backups involved.

The idea of 3) goes beyond the scope of our mission [1], which wants to ensure a simple backup tool.

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/DejaDup/Mission

[Cole Robinson (crobinso)]

I updated my hard drive size to accomodate so this hasn't affected me in a long time. However, if this is still current behavior, there's definitely things to improve given the stated Mission.

* Does the UI make it clear if the backup destination is less than 2x size of the first full backup? At least some warning label if it fails some heuristic check
* Does the UI give a more clear error when this case fails? Something along the lines of what you wrote: For safety deja-dup aims to have two full backups, you may need to free up space on your backup destination.

Rather than just repeatedly attempting the same backup and failing over and over.