No space left on empty drive/partition

Getting Help
1

Hey Gang-

Been using restic thru wasabi/s3 for snapshots the last year or so. Borked my system so need to restore a snapshot for the first time. My home dir is empty (1.8T) and the original saved dir is around 500GB. All snapshots are intact remotely.

When I try to restore the latest snapshot, I get the error, “no space left on drive, ~/.cache/restic/”. I opened up all permissions thinking that was it but no luck. Also googled web and this site.

Thanks in advance.

2

I should have mentioned above using ubuntu 23.04 live usb drive to run it and restic 0.14. Switched to ubuntu 22.04 and seems I am getting the same error. Looks to be processing but if I cancel I get a stream of ‘device full’ issues.

3

Please check out this page. Maybe you can try setting a different cache dir (e.g. on the target drive) or disable caching entirely?

4

Disabling caching will drastically reduce the restore performance. Just pass --cache-dir /path/to/a/disk/with/sufficient/free/space to restic.

5

Thanks for the tips. Adding a cache (which was wiped out when /home was originally corrupted and reformatted) returned a response. I also realized that I had not pruned since inception so had 190 snapshots which I reduced significantly. A restore is now running but I am currently getting a lot of “permission denied” errors, that for now, look to be .git repos stored locally. So I am not confident.

I am really at a loss after looking around for solutions and coming up empty.

6

That should only happen if you restore to an already existing folder. Please restore to an empty folder and move everything back into its place afterwards.

7

Thanks for the follow-up. For some reason, I could not do a full restore to a new location (VPN, excessive transit times, SE-Asia<–>US West coast server). I didn’t document why not, i.e. bunch of erros, but I have resigned myself to mounting the dd saved image and shuffling things back to original place. Will keep digging in to learning restic though.

FWIW: I was ‘stuck’ on version 0.14 using ubuntu 23.04 and was able to upgrade to 0.16 using restic’s self-update feature. That wasn’t immediately obvious to me in the beginning.

I will close for now as it is reasonably solved.