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I've been reading the FAQs and man page for rsnapshot and I'm struggling to find out what it would do in the event of the backup partition being full.

Ie. If I set the backups to run hourly, backing up to a dedicated backup partition. What happens when this partition hits 100% usage.

Does it automatically rotate/delete older backups or does it just bail out and crash?

I'm looking at "simple" backup solutions that have some kind of survivability if the backup partition ever becomes full.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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With a default configuration (save for changing the backup location to /smallbup) and rsnapshot 1.3.1

svr-backup-01 ~ # lvcreate --name smallbup --size 32M RAID
  Logical volume "smallbup" created
svr-backup-01 ~ # mkfs.ext4 -q -m 0 /dev/RAID/smallbup 
svr-backup-01 ~ # mkdir /smallbup
svr-backup-01 ~ # mount /dev/RAID/smallbup /smallbup/
svr-backup-01 ~ # rsnapshot hourly
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync: write failed on "/smallbup/hourly.0/localhost/home/fukawi2/LSK-Database-1GB.dd": No space left on device (28)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(322) [receiver=3.0.9]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (1107 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
rsnapshot encountered an error! The program was invoked with these options:
/usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 12 while processing /home/
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4092 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe     (32)
rsync: write failed on "/smallbup/hourly.0/localhost/usr/local/man/man5/husk.conf.5p": No space left on device (28)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(322) [receiver=3.0.9]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (178 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9]
ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 12 while processing /usr/local/

So in summary, rsync will return an error (12). rsnapshot does not handle that, and aborts, leaving a full filesystem:

svr-backup-01 ~ # df -h /smallbup/
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/RAID-smallbup   31M   31M   13K 100% /smallbup
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  • Well that answers that question! The quest continues for a simple piece of backup software that can handle such an event. Thanks!
    – choco-loo
    May 6, 2013 at 11:16
  • I'm seeing the same errors when I run out of space. The annoying part is that if you google those code 11 and code 12 errors you get results that tell you your permissions or paths are wrong. This just adds to the amateur cobbled-together impression I get from rsnapshot.
    – Adam
    Mar 12, 2014 at 0:04

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