Smart Update Onto Source Drive -> Disk Full
 

This morning I found that my overnight backup had failed, and there was a message from OS X saying that my boot drive was full, even though there should have been about 40 GB free. Sure enough, the Finder reported that the drive was totally full. The destination drive was called HDBackupOdd, and it turns out that SuperDuper had been backing up into a folder called /Volumes/HDBackupOdd. But this was a regular folder on the source drive, not the mount point of the destination drive. So it copied the source into itself until the drive was full.

Everthing's fixed now, but I wanted to report this in case someone else runs into a similar problem and freaks out wondering why their drive is suddenly full.

I had mounted and unmounted the destination drive several times before starting the backup, so I guess somehow SuperDuper got confused and used the wrong mount point. Perhaps in a future version it could do some kind of check to make sure that the destination path is actually on the selected destination device.

Actually, we do. The problem in this situation is that the drive must have fallen off the bus while we were copying. We don't check to see whether the mount point is "real" during every operation -- only during any "destructive" operations (such as a delete)...

Re: Smart Update Onto Source Drive -> Disk Full
 

Thank you for posting this! I just had the EXACT same issue. I've been up all night trying to find space on my boot drive (source drive), so that I can get a solid backup of my data.

Shirt-pocket, please advise!

Not quite sure what advice you're looking for... This user's post indicates where the space likely is (/Volumes); you can get to that folder with Finder's "Go to Folder" command...