Re: Filespace exhaustion on '/' partition

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 02:45:21PM +0100, Ron Leach wrote:
> I mounted the root partition at /mnt/test and used du.
> 
> server4:/home/ron# du /mnt/test/mnt -hx --max-depth=1
> 2.7G    /mnt/test/mnt/backupserver
> 0       /mnt/test/mnt/test
> 2.7G    /mnt/test/mnt
> server4:/home/ron#
> 
> The 2.7GB is the remnant of a first backup attempt to a new backup
> server.  We backup over NFS, to a server mounted at
> /mnt/backupserver.
> 
> During that backup trial, the new backup server was not configured
> correctly, and this machine had not - actually - seen it, though it
> had appeared to do so.  As a result, this machine tried to do a
> backup to that destination, /mnt/backupserver, and had - evidently -
> filled the root partition before complaining about space.

Here's how to avoid that:

Mount /mnt/backupserver

Make sure your backup system is writing to
/mnt/backupserver/specialcodename/hostname/...

If your backup system can't see the specialcodename directory,
it should not create it, but give an error message instead.
(Test this, and write a wrapper if your backup system
obstinately decides to create intermediate directories for you.)

-dsr-