Re: [Duplicity-talk] temporary space usage?

[Peter Schuller]

> The /tmp partition has 5GB free and my volume size is 100MB. Reading the
> man page suggests I should only need about my volume size, or twice that
> amount if I use the new asynchronous upload.

This is correct (or supposed to be).

> I monitored disk usage during the backup process, and quite predictably
> there is a /tmp/duplicity-* folder that grows up to 5GB and causes a
> backup failure.
> 
> Lookup through the --verbose log, I am seeing the program get in some
> kind of loop of trying to backup it's own temporary files, e.g.
> 
> # grep 'Generating delta' run.log
> [..]
> Generating delta - new file: tmp/duplicity-7iJeV2-tempdir
> Generating delta - new file: tmp/duplicity-7iJeV2-tempdir/mktemp--7oYNN-9
> Generating delta - new file: tmp/duplicity-7iJeV2-tempdir/mktemp-0Gm_gG-57
> Generating delta - new file: tmp/duplicity-7iJeV2-tempdir/mktemp-1yTRKr-65
> Generating delta - new file: tmp/duplicity-7iJeV2-tempdir/mktemp-2J2xgs-32
> Generating delta - new file: tmp/duplicity-7iJeV2-tempdir/mktemp-4dawDM-61
> 
> Going to run those again and explicitely skip /tmp to confrm, but it
> looks like some pretty basic recursion problem got overlooked?

Hmm, are you trying to backup a file system tree which does in fact
contain your temporary directory? I could be wrong (haven't
specifically checked) but I'm pretty sure there is no explicit attempt
in duplicity to detect this fact.

However that said, even if it does try to backup itself, it should
not, off the top of my head, cause it to consuming an indefinite
amount of temporary space.

If at any point it is unable to remove a temporary file, it *should*
warn about this. I take it you do not see any warnings about inability
to delete temporary files? These warnings should show up at default
verbosity, as actual failures like that are emitted at a higher
severity level (aka lower verbosity).

One thing you could do is run a backup that manifests this problem
with -v9 and give us the output. Also, the actual contents (filenames)
of the duplicity tempdir when it eventually fails.

-- 
/ Peter Schuller

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