Not enough target volume space?
 

I have a 500GB Intel iMac running the latest version of Tiger and SuperDuper! and have been using a 500GB LaCie Firewire drive to perform smart backups for over 6 months. Lately, however, the smart backup starts, runs for a bit, and then I get an error message saying there's not enough room on the target volume to continue the backup. There's about 60GB of free space on my source iMac, so I'm confused as to the reason for the lack of room on the target. Until these recent errors, I've run smart backups with much less free space on the source than this and never had these errors. Any insights would be appreciated, as I've had to run full backups erasing the target disc while this has been going on. Thanks!

Have you reviewed the Troubleshooting section of the User's Guide? I go into some detail there regarding this kind of thing -- there's a whole part dedicated to disk full errors...

Same problem here. As I understand the backup (smart) cannot be bigger than the harddrive. I have a 202 GB disk in my macbook and a 202 GB partition on an external USB drive. There´s another for TM. Currently I have 20 GB space on my macbook drive and the backup partition says only 1.7 GB free. Shouldn´t smartbackup just "mirror" the internal drive to the external backup drive???

A bit confusing for me.

Did you review the Troubleshooting section, as suggested above? I explain in detail how Smart Update works and why this can happen...

Yes, I checked the documentation. It says that I have to erase the backup and copy again and switch to smart again, right? A bit complicated. Couldn´t it be usefull to add a function that can bypass it, or let smart backup run smarter?
just a suggestion, because it takes a long time to backup 180GB again.
cheers

Well, it explains how this can happen. You can 'help' Smart Update, in a situation like you've run into, but moving/renaming the same folder or files that have caused the problem in the first place... but there's no 'switch' to make smart update run 'smarter'.