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