Luciano Rocha wrote:
On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 11:24:16AM -0500, Robert wrote:
I deleted one copy of the backup, as I've done in the past and made a new crontab entry to try the backup again 2 or 3 minutes later. It was still running several hours later, which couldn't possibly be right. Next, I tried clearing the backup on the backup drive and manually copying directories to it. That didn't work too well, either. At some point, I tried to send an email using SeaMonkey and couldn't, because it was unable "to write a temporary copy". I quickly found that that wasn't all it couldn't write, too.
I tried restarting KDE, which got nowhere. Almost everything worked O.K. from the command line, the most obvious exception being that I was unable to read any man pages as a non-privileged user until after I had accessed that man page as root.
All symptoms that you've run out of space. Your backup has probably gone to the root disk, not the backup one, and it ended backing up the backup of the backup of the ....
Free some space and everything should work OK.
BINGO!
I feel especially bad because I have seen the "out of disk space" problem before but not while trying to nudge a backup. It's nice to sit in front of an old friend rather than this stranger but serious use will come only after I liberate a lot more space.
Thanks for your help and the clue by lhecking!
Regards, Robert