Insufficient Disk Space

[TechnicalAnal1]

Hi,

I'm using BE 2010 R3 to backup to disk, it's a SCSI EMC lifeline disk. I have a server which has recently been failing with insufficient disk space, the backups on the 2003 R2 target server are 6GB C:\ and 22 GB on the D:\.

On my backup exec server (2008 R2), I have 7GB of free windows space on the disk, but 100GB+ of over writeable media. The disk is inventoried every day using a scheduled job.

I don't know why I'm receiving the insufficient disk space error

Final error: 0xe00084f2 - An attempt to write data past the end of the media has failed.
Final error category: Backup Media Errors
Storage device "backup disk" reported an error on a request to write data to media.
 

If there's enough space on my backup server. Could the issue be to do with my source server being backed up, not have enough free space on the local disk. For example, the source server has 768MB free of disk space, if VSS creates a copy of open files on the local disk, but fails due to lack of space, would it generate and log the error as above?

Thanks

[TechnicalAnal1]

What are people's thought's on disk defragging with backup exec, if the server being backed up or the server being backed up to has a heavily defragged disk, could it cause issues with VSS writers?

[Phill_McSherry]

There is a difference between free space and overwriteable space. While I never used BE 2010 R3 to backup to disk, I do know that BESR wouldnt delete the old data, until the backup of the new data was complete.

If the same holds true to your example, then to backup 28GB of data (uncompressed) onto a disk, you would need a minimum of 60GB FREE space. Once the backup completed sucessfully, it would delete the old data.

Deleting the data before the backup has finished could leave you open to data loss, and why it doesnt overwrite any data when backing up.

To get around this, write a script to delete the data before the new backup starts. This is something that I had to implement at a client, but they also backed all data up to tape so there was no risk of data loss.

[Ken_Putnam]

 I do know that BESR wouldnt delete the old data, until the backup of the new data was complete.

Backup Exec operates differently.  If the data media OPP has passed, the data can be overwritten when a job starts

Manage this by setting your OPP properly, only doing Overwrite, not Append jobs, and by selecting the option to "use overwriteable media in the target media set before scratch media"