Comment 8 for bug 503597

Thanks for your contribution. A fix solving the bug is already committed and will be released within this month. With the fix applied, there is no longer a need to force the backup (or to incorporate an option to do so). Let my explain how it works:

* in the case of full backups the required uncompressed space is computed and the backup is done only if enough disk space is available.
* if an incremental backup is created the required uncompressed space of the files actually being backed up is computed. The backup is aborted if not enough disk space is available.

Simple and consistent.

Some words about an additional option: It is, IMO, not a good idea to force a backup if not enough disk space is available. Such option would be dangerous for the most of the users. Moreover, if you know you have only little disk space available you can check your space before doing a manual backup. I think this is similar to an additional action triggered by such option. So, frankly speaking I believe If someone would use this option he knows that there is only little disk space and should check it manually instead.

To the autoremove thing: there is already such feature - the purging of old snapshots. Introducing another autoremove is dangerous again since I usually want to keep some old snapshots instead of remove them. Moreover, it is hard to decide for software (meaning to implement) what snapshots should be removed and what to keep. And disk space is getting cheaper and cheaper.

I aggree that a useful feature would be the fallback to an incremental backup if there is not enough space for a full backup. However, this requires an existing and valid snapshot as parent/base.

Hope this helps,
Jean-Peer