Warning "not enough free disc space"

[jtamark]

First time user. I am trying perform an initial copy, mirroring the desktop onto a separate Seagate drive. It's giving me an error warning that the source (my desktop) doesn't free disk space available.
It says;
Required: 498 GB
Available: 229 GB

How can I solve this?

[xCSxXenon]

Get more disk space?

[jtamark]

I have a Linux Mint OS. I checked free disc space with the df -h command, and it appears to show plenty of free space. Am I wrong?

joe@joe-Studio-XPS-435MT:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 1.2G 2.4M 1.2G 1% /run
/dev/sda6 436G 200G 214G 49% /
tmpfs 5.9G 1.3G 4.6G 22% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 12K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 1.2G 16M 1.2G 2% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdc1 1.9T 465G 1.4T 25% /media/joe/Seagate Basic

I an guessing that the problem is that freefilessync thinks the source drive, my desktop, doesn't have enough space. But it's not actually sensing the available free space on the computer, it's just looking at my desktop. It's an mistake by the program, right? Can I safely ignore it?

Joe

[jtamark]

On re-exam, perhaps you are right. It looks like my primary drive is 49% full. freefiles might temporarily store files on that while it copies to them backup drive. If that's the case, 49% full is too much. Am I correct on this?

[xCSxXenon]

You don't have a single volume that is large enough to store the 498GB of data you are trying to transfer

[jtamark]

I checked my desktop properties, it's showing " 5,328 items, totalling 19.0 GB (19.0 GB on disk) "

Desktop free space is " 229.4 GB "

So there should be plenty of space to do the transfer. Am I missing something?

[xCSxXenon]

We both are missing something lol
Can you screenshot your FFS window, showing the locations?
Sounds like the root issue here is that 19GB is turning into 500GB XD

[jtamark]

How is this:

Screenshot at 2025-02-16 13-03-44.png (94.21 KiB) Viewed 2837 times

[xCSxXenon]

Can you screenshot your FFS window, showing the locations?

[jtamark]

Xenon,
I think I see the problem. As a first time user, freefilesync was set to "synchronize two-way" when I wanted "mirror," which is more appropriate for backups. With two-way, it was trying to load everything on my backup drive onto the desktop.

Let me try to do the backup as "mirror" as see if that solves it. If I am mistaken, please let me know.

Joe

[xCSxXenon]

Yes, that would do it!

[xCSxXenon]

With that said, I would run a comparison first! Sounds like you may inadvertently delete data from the Seagate backup based on your earlier description

[jtamark]

Backup complete. Xenon, what where you pointing out re run a comparison first? What should I check for?

Also, had errors on the many file titles. Freefilessync doesn't like titles with a blank space at either end, or having these characters ? | : I was able to change the titles when the error popped up, so that is a one-time problem.

[xCSxXenon]

I was worried that you were going to delete data from the Seagate backup. Since you initially started with two-way syncing, FFS needed 500GB of space, and your Desktop only contained 19GB of data, that means the location you selected on the backup drive contained 480GB of data that DOESN'T exist on your Desktop. That means when you switch it to mirror syncing, and that 480GB doesn't exist on the "source"(left) side, that data is going to be deleted from the "destination"(right) side to achieve a mirror.

[jtamark]

But I'm good now, right? Since the error stopped the two-way?

The default is for a mirror sync. For first time users there should be warning message about that.

I know, we can't protect everyone from themselves, ...but still.

[xCSxXenon]

The justification is that FFS isn't a backup program, but a syncing program. Syncing is regarded as "to make synchronous in operation", so arguably any actions/events on either side should be replicated on the other, regardless of location, thus two-way makes sense. I see how this can be confusing, which is why reading documentation is important, but I'm also not naive to the fact that almost nobody does ¯\_(•_•)_/¯

[jtamark]

Ah, I heard about FFS on a Linux Mint forum, in a discussion about backups. The idea of merely updating the backup file, instead of saving it all again, is brilliant.

Yes, no one reads the manual cover to cover. In my defense, I did watch the instructional videos and even took notes, but I must have missed the mirror vs two-way setting.

Xenon, thanks for helping me out with this. Your questions guided me to the the answer, to look at the backup size, which lead me to the correction. Thank you.

[xCSxXenon]

My pleasure, glad you got it working