Why does Déjà Dup say there is no space left?

I'm trying to backup my home directory (excluding a few folders). The backup is saved on a ~300 GB partition (called backups) of an internal drive, but not the same drive as the home directory. When I try to backup, everything goes OK until at some point Déjà Dup says there is no space left on "backups". The problem is that Déjà Dup only used ~20 GB at this point, so there is a ton of space left. I tried several times without luck.

Why is Déjà Dup saying this?

The size of my home directory, without the excluded folders, is 136 GB.

Solution 1:

So there are three possible places where Deja Dup might be out of space, and I don't think its error message tells you which. There is a bug filed about that.

• You may have run out of space on the target partition (which it sounds like you didn't)
• You may have run out of space in your home directory (~/.cache/deja-dup can get large)
• You may have run out of space in /tmp

Solution 2:

You can move the location of the cache-directory as follows (create a symlink to a new cache location)

mkdir /othervolume/.deja-dup-cache
mv ~/.cache/deja-dup/* /othervolume/.deja-dup-cache/
rmdir ~/.cache/deja-dup
ln -sf /othervolume/.deja-dup-cache ~/.cache/deja-dup

to change the location of the tmp-directory have a look at the following post: Deja Dup backup, change use of /tmp to another folder/location