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  #1  
Old 11-06-2009, 12:37 AM
tracedef tracedef is offline
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Startup Disk Out of Space After Failed Backup to External

I was backing up to an external drive doing normal backups and a couple hours in I had forgotten a backup was in progress and disconnected my laptop not noticing that Super Duper was still running.

I took a nap and when I woke had a "Startup Disk is Full Message". Was thinking this must be Super Duper temp files taking up all the space (100 gigs free, normally) so I rebooted hoping they would clear on to find that there was still only 150mb left and finder and doc won't load on boot.

I've booted to an external and now would like to clean up the temp files on the original hard drive but don't know where to find them if they are even visible. Anyone know how to delete the Super Duper temp cache or any related files that are taking up space after the failed backup?

Any feedback greatly appreciated!

Last edited by tracedef; 11-06-2009 at 12:40 AM.
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  #2  
Old 11-06-2009, 04:06 AM
chris_johnsen chris_johnsen is offline
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Without your backup volume connected, look in the folder named Volumes on your normal starup volume for a directory with the same name as your usual backup volume. You can check that it is it the one taking up lots of space by using Finder's Get Info or du -sh <dirname> at a Terminal command line.

Delete it (be sure to empty the trash if you use Finder; or very carefully use rm -rf from a Terminal command line).

The problem is that when the backup volume suddenly disappears (i.e. you unplug it while SuperDuper! is working), the ongoing file copies end up being stored on the boot volume.
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Old 11-06-2009, 04:16 AM
tracedef tracedef is offline
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That did it Chris, thank you so much. Didn't even know I had to show hidden folders, but it occurred to me when I couldn't find "volumes".... thanks!!!
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  #4  
Old 11-06-2009, 12:27 PM
boblozano boblozano is offline
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nice if this was automated

Chris, thanks for the info - I also had the "startup disk full problem", though not sure why it occurred.

I left a smartbackup running when I went to bed last night of a drive with 1.1tb of content, with perhaps 2-3 gb of changes. Got up this morning to find SD failed, then looked at the log to see the "out of space on startup drive" message. Both external drives appeared to be running fine.

It would be great if, in this case, SD would clean up after itself, or at least offer to do so. The current behavior, if I understand it correctly, is fairly anti-social. This turned out to cost me a few hours of lost time.

Btw, been using SD for about 3 years, & this is actually the first significant problem that I've had (where SD hurt more than it helped). So in balance, still glad that I bought it.
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  #5  
Old 11-06-2009, 12:52 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Yeah, this can happen when a drive fails/disconnects itself in some cases. This rarely happens (as you've seen yourself), but is quite annoying when it does.

It's not always easy to tell if it's happened or not, though, without doing a lot of tests against every file copied or so, and that would slow things down. But we know it sucks, and it's on the list of things to improve.
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  #6  
Old 11-06-2009, 01:16 PM
boblozano boblozano is offline
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something simpler, perhaps?

I may have something simpler in mind. What I was thinking was that SD knew that it had failed (indicating, I think that the startup disk was full in the log) and had terminated the operation.

When I clicked "OK", could I have optionally requested that all temp files be deleted? As it was I clicked OK, then was left on my own to figure out that it was SD that had filled up my drive (in a hidden directory, on top of that).

Btw, I was copying from an external drive to another external drive (both >tb), and working with a 250gb startup drive (laptop).

Thanks.
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Old 11-06-2009, 01:17 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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It doesn't know the startup disk is full. It knows the disk it's writing to is full, and it thinks it's writing to the drive you selected.

These aren't temporary files: an attached drive looks like a folder on your regular drive, in the /Volumes folder. When you write to that folder, the information is actually written to the other drive...
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  #8  
Old 11-06-2009, 01:28 PM
boblozano boblozano is offline
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So in my case would one scenario have been that sometime overnight the target drive dropped off, sd continued writing to the folder (under /Volumes) until the startup drive filled up then threw the error, then sometime before I went to check the target drive reappeared?

Thanks.
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  #9  
Old 11-06-2009, 01:30 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Exactly. And when it reappeared it probably mounted as <drive name> 1, since <drive name> was already taken.
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