drakbackup crashes X session?

[Trio3b]

Using MDK 10.2. Did a drakbackup of user files yesterday and let it run while I browsed. Upon shutting down for the day and restarting next morning, MDK booted into CL mode indicating an X server error. Fortunately I happened to glance at the boot screen when there was a notice that hda5 was full. (hda1 Wxp, hda2 FAT). Only thing to cause this was the backup.

 

Used a knoppix disk to hunt around for a bloated file and found it in var/lib/drackbackup/<user>.gz file.

Booted back into MDK CL, deleted the backup file (about 3 gb) , regained disk space and X is back to normal.

 

Several questions:

1. Booted knoppix, mounted the MDK partition, changed permissions of the hda5 to delete or move the file but could not. Report was that file was read only. Why could I not have access? (new to knoppix)

2. Why would drakbackup allow itself to continue if it was going to use up enough disk space to crash a boot into GUI?

3. Is this a bug?

4. How do I determine BEFORE backup if there is sufficient space?

5. On reading the posts here there are similar problems. Does this happen EVEN IF there is sufficient space?

 

I saw the suggestion for mondo <whatever> backups. Are there any other utilities if drakbackup is no good?

 

 

 

 

Thanks for any help

Edited October 19, 2007 by Trio3b

[adamw]

1. Knoppix may have mounted the partition read-only for safety. In that case you'd have to re-mount it rw.

 

2, 3, and 4: the problem is that you *can't* reliably know. The backup files will be compressed. You cannot know how much smaller a given set of data will be after compression except by compressing it (the classic 'the simulation is the action' problem). So it's basically impossible to write such a check.

 

For instance, say your /home is 10GB in size, and there's only 1GB free on the partition that holds /var. You might say, well, obviously that's not going to be enough space, drakbackup shouldn't let the backup proceed. But if that 10GB is highly compressible text files, 1GB likely *will* be enough space for the backup. If that 10GB is highly non-compressible MP3 files, it obviously won't. Most real-life scenarios fall somewhere between these easily distinguished example scenarios, and it is therefore basically impossible to write a useful test.

 

5. No, not as far as I know.

 

There are many other backup utilities for Linux, but they tend towards the does-absolutely-everything-with-a-very-scary-interface end of the scale. There's rather a lack of utilities more in drakbackup's just-does-simple-backups-quite-easily class.