Backups completely filling root drive.

[Tony Arnold]

Larry,

On Tue, 2006-09-26 at 09:37 -0500, Larry Alkoff wrote:
> I have effectively destroyed two Kubuntu 6.0.6 installations while 
> attempting to copy to a mounted backup drive using cp -a.  When the copy 
> finishes, df says there is 0 space left in my / partition and I don't 
> know why.  The / partition is normally 10 gig with 3.5 gig used.
> 
> Now that I'm working with my 3rd install, I'd like to try and find out 
> what happened.
> 
> I have a feeling it has to do with the fact that the target drive is 
> mounted under /mnt/name but I don't see why that should have anything to 
> do with the space on the source partition.

Have you looked to see where all the space on the root partition has
gone? You can use du for this, e.g.,

	cd /
	du -sh *

will give you a summary of each top directory in /. You can drill down
to find further information.

Does the copy complete successfully and are all the files you expect
in /mnt/name?

Output from a mount command or df plus the exact command you used might
be helpful.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold