[PLUG] HELP! Disk is screwed up!

[John Jordan]

On 12 Feb 2006, at 13:05, Vram wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 12:17 -0800, John Jordan wrote:
> > OK, now things are really bad. Can't even log in. The hard disk is
> > full again. 
> > 
> > I just freed up 15 Gb of space. What the hell is going on? 
>
> Can you monitor the process that are going on??

With Keith's help the problem is resolved. Evidently when you tell 
Dump to "Abort" it doesn't stop running; it just takes it upon itself 
to find another place to continue the backup. So when I unplugged 
my USB pocket drive this morning after telling Dump to abort, 
Dump appeared to quit but, in fact, continued writing to the mount 
point instead of the USB disk. 

After shutting down and restarting, and then shelling to a command 
line and deleting even more files, I still couldn't log in. It seems that 
if the backup wasn't finished, Dump will restart itself the minute the 
computer is turned back on, and then continue to write the backup 
file.

When I got home from FreeGeek this evening and had time to look, 
there was a 26 GB backup file in /media/usbdisk. No wonder my 
laptop's hard disk kept getting filled up. The more files I deleted, 
the more dump added to the backup file, keeping my hard disk at 
100% used.

So now I'm back shopping for a decent backup solution. Everything 
is either massive, designed for huge networked environments with 
thousands of users, or hopelessly buggy and useless (e.g., Simple 
Backup). Why can't Linux have a simple little one-user utility to 
back up to an external hard disk?