sbackup will merrily eat all hard disk space

[Håvard Dahle]

Package: sbackup
Version: 0.8-1
Severity: critical
Justification: causes serious data loss; consumes all of /


The daemon is configured to backup to /media/backup, which is a usb 
disk. 

When the disk is not mounted (e.g. when I forget to plug it in when I 
turn on the box), /media/backup is of coursly nothing but a regular dir 
on /.

So, sbackupd notices that there are no previous backups and steams ahead 
with a full backup. This quickly fills up /. 

Perhaps sbackupd should (in prioritized order):
 o not eat all disk space
 o verify that there is disk space
 o support a pre-hook where the sysadmin can mount the external medium / 
check that it is mounted

Regarding the `Severity: critical' tag, I hope you agree that a full / 
is a sorry state, even though it is easily remedied.

Thanks,

Håvard

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers breezy-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'breezy-updates'), (500, 'breezy-security'), (500, 'breezy')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.12-9-k7
Locale: LANG=en_ZA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_ZA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages sbackup depends on:
ii  gksu                  1.3.0-1ubuntu11    graphical frontend to su
ii  python                2.4.2-0ubuntu2     An interactive high-level object-o
ii  python-glade2         2.8.1-0ubuntu2     GTK+ bindings: Glade support
ii  python-gnome2         2.12.1-0ubuntu1    Python bindings for the GNOME desk
ii  sudo                  1.6.8p9-2ubuntu2.1 Provide limited super user privile

sbackup recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information