Backups completely filling root drive.

Larry Alkoff labradley at mindspring.com
Tue Sep 26 16:54:30 UTC 2006


Tony Arnold wrote:
> 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.


Thanks for your reply Tony.

First I used df and realized there was a big problem.  That threw me for 
a loop.

I also used du but of course it included the /mnt drives.  Only found 
the -x parameter today.  Since I suspect the /mnt/name files (they were 
the target) I can check with du -x.

The copy did not complete sucessfully because the target ran out of space.

I'll shut down, re-install the old target drive and give you the info 
you need later today.

Larry

-- 
Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX
Using Thunderbird on Linux




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