Backup no space left on drive

[robbo007]

My back is now reporting no space left on my drive. I have assigned this drive only to the backup. This was never happening before. Does tmbackup auto delete older backups to create more space? Whats the best approach to fix this? Delete old backups?

rsync: [receiver] write failed on "/mnt/backup/full/2025-08-22-000001/home/unrealircd/unrealircd/logs/ircd.log": No space left on device (28)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(381) [receiver=3.2.7]
rsync: [sender] write error: Broken pipe (32)
rsync_tmbackup: [WARNING] Rsync reported a warning. Run this command for more details: grep -E 'rsync:|rsync error:' '/root/.rsync_tmbackup/2025-08-22-000002.log'

[laurent22]

It probably needs at least a bit of space to run the script. Maybe you can manually delete one of the old backups?

[robbo007]

ok, Even though the script is located on a different volume (main one) which has space? Is it safe to manually delete the oldest backup without issue with restoration in the future?

[laurent22]

Yes that won't cause any issue to restore other backup sets in the future

[steinhh]

But note that deleting old backups won't free up as much space as you might think: any file that exists unchanged in later backups will still take up exactly the same amount of space.