DietPi-Backup | Enhance G_PROMPT_BACKUP

[Phil1988]

DietPi-Backup | Enhance G_PROMPT_BACKUP

[Phil1988]

Oh this would be indeed pretty useful, but understandable low priority on you side.
(Ah and your assumption was right, that I never did a dietpi-backup before)

Its honestly unbelievable how good your support and dietpi is for such a long period!

[Joulinar]

It depends on your backup location. Usually default location is within /mnt. Simply remove backup folder.

[Phil1988]

like this one right?

(just do be safe to not delete something important)

[Joulinar]

Yes correct

[Phil1988]

Thanks a lot, it works now.
Is there a simple way for you to integrate a short "availible disk space" check before doing such a the backup?
If no, then you can simply close this one as its not a really important improvement or a bug.

[MichaIng]

There was a disk space check included some DietPi versions ago. We intentionally removed it since it took much time and gave incorrect results on network drives. And we thought that an error like "no space left" is quite clear and you would know what to do?

To have disk space better in view, you can add it to the login banner via dietpi-banner. Or use df -h to get a general overview of mounts and their free/used space.

[Phil1988]

Ahh that explains it!

I remembered that "some moons ago" there was such a hint, but completely understandable that you removed it.
And yes, its obvious that files have to be deleted, but for me I didnt know what files.

Maybe it might be great that if the backup failed in this case, it automatically removes the files directly.
But surely you have more important things to do.

I will close this now and thank you for this great piece of software!

[MichaIng]

In such case it is hard to say what the admin/user wants: If there was a backup before which is just updated, then the added disk usage is usually very small, so one might want to remove other data instead, ah or try to get some space via dietpi-cleaner 🙂. If it is a new backup and hence incomplete, removing is more likely to be wanted, until enough space is provided/cleared otherwise. We could add some info in case of an error, or extend the error message to contain the path to the backup, with the info that it is safe to remove it from there and start over. rsync does not throw a particular error code when aborting due to insufficient disk space, but one which contains this case: https://manpages.debian.org/rsync#EXIT_VALUES

23 - Partial transfer due to error

This should be it.

Would be nice if you can tell me how I can delete the failed backup which was something about 120GB as it failed.
I didnt expected it fo get this big :)

I read this just now. We could also add an info to the backup prompt, telling what exactly is backed up. As long as /mnt/dietpi_userdata is located on the rootfs, it is backed up as well, which in case contains media files, downloads and other data, which can be quite big. If userdata have been moved to an external drive, it is skipped, so then only the system itself and data in /var/lib and users' home dirs are backed up.

[Phil1988]

As my /mnt/dietpi_userdata is on the rootfs and contains like ~2TB user data, I think that was the issue here and a dietp-cleaner wouldnt make a difference :D

So everything is fine for me and I will remember everything for future.

[MichaIng]

Makes sense then to exclude userdata with the include/exclude filters. But I think in general a simple toggle for this would be helpful. This is actually long on the ToDo already, but low-priority indeed. In this particular case, the main problem is that you likely did not use dietpi-backup before, hence could not know about the backup location etc, and the prompt triggered by the upgrade script (and also e.g. by dietpi-software reinstall ... and some other cases) does not show you the dietpi-backup menu with all the info, but just runs the backup with default settings when you hit "yes".

Let me open this issue as a reminder for this enhancement. We can e.g. check whether the dietpi-backup config file exists, and show the full menu if not, so users see the backup location, can chance it and other settings etc, before the backup runs.