Restoring VM causes drive to fill but it isn't full..

[Drew White]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to restore a guest.
I have / which has 2.1 GB free. (The root drive where things exist)
Then I have my /var/lib/qubes with 78 GB free. (drive which contains all my Guests)

I try to restore a guest which takes up ~ 48 GB.

Upon initialising the restore script, my / drive starts to fill up completely.
And then the software says it has errors (specifically, no space left on drive).

It's already extracted a file list to the correct directory on /var/lib/qubes.

Why does it tell me the drive is full when there is over 78 GB free and it should be using /var/lib/qubes not / ?

Is this a bug in the Qubes Restore?

[Drew White]

Only way I found to work around this bug is to perform the following..

On secondary drive create a directory for holding information..
Get to the second stage of the restore.
Open the /var/tmp directory.
Delete the restore_XXXXXX directory
Create a link of that name in the /var/tmp directory that links to the directory on the other drive.

Doing this meant that the actual usage of drive space never went over 200 MB for that folder.

The system was unable to extract the menus and apps.templates directory and a few other meaningless things that wouldn't prevent the system from working.

Why when it's targeting in your /var/tmp directory does it absorb the / disk drive in a matter of seconds?

Is it just a bug in the code somewhere?
Or is it a file system thing?
Or is it the "stick-bit" ?

I created a new directory there with no sticky bit, and the entire restore utility couldn't extract to that directory.

Only way around it was to create the new directory and link it to a folder on the storage drive.

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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Yes, /var/tmp is used to restore the data and there is (currently) no
option to use alternative location. So you method with symlinking
/var/tmp is currently one of the best what you can do...

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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