Linux Format forums

Re: Full backup hard drive

guy — Sun Jul 17, 2011 6:01 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 6:01 pm

What is your backup program supposed to do when the drive fills up?

That's a bit rhetorical - I never like challenging the program's quality with real-life boundary conditions like that. Yes, get rid of the oldest backups to create some space - just check whether you should be archiving them somewhere first!

A routine script to archive/delete the oldest file after backing up might be useful - assuming of course that it behaves sensibly if the archive medium is full!

Re: Full backup hard drive

nelz — Sat Jul 16, 2011 5:07 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 5:07 pm

bobthebob1234 wrote:

Are they really there, overwriting old ones or what?

I would hope not, it would be a lousy backup program that overwrote the previous backups before verifying the new ones.

I'd suggest deleting some of the 50-odd old backups you have to make some space, or switch to a system that uses incremental backups.

Full backup hard drive

bobthebob1234 — Sat Jul 16, 2011 3:52 pm

Author: bobthebob1234

Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 3:52 pm

Code:

jim@vle1:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 294G 294G 0 100% /backup-hdd

What happens now?
Backups are still appearing, and ls -lh says they are about the right size (5.5gb tars, once a week), however extracting the latest one I get

Code:

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Are they really there, overwriting old ones or what?

I have used webmin to set up a filesystem backup (well a directory backup).

I guess I need to write a quick script to delete old backups?