There is not enough disk space available to write the on-disk catalogs

[Molenski]

Hi there,

One of our servers over here in sunny Germany (W2k/Veritas 9.1) has a lot of data to back up (approx 280Gb which is a lot for us) and has been taking too long. I changed the backup type from Full to Differential (in order to speed things up) last night and the server failed with the error message specified in the subject line above. I've changed the backup type back to Full as it seems too much of a coincidence that the server failed the night I changed the backup type to Diff so hopefully the server will backup successfully tonight! My question is, when performing a Diff as opposed to a Full, does Veritas require more space; if so why??? We have approx 10Gb on the Catalogue drive and when running a Full, the server has been fine. Could it be just coincidence? We are limited to our disk space over here so what are my options? I have not done anything else such as stopping and restarting the services as I want to narrow the problem down.

Any help would be great!

 

[DTracy]

Are you writing your backup data to a disk file?

If so, check the append and overwrite dates on the B2D file folder. Perhaps the date for overwrite could be shortened or the append date changed, there are many posibilities. What I'm getting at is that you may have multiple copies of your data on the drive, or several days worth of full backups.

There is a little free space trapped in the recycle bin and in the amount of space set aside for that feature. Look in your system settings for this and if you don't need that much space or a recycle bin at all, use this.

If you are serious about getting the most out of your backup space, change your scheme to a weekly full backup with daily incremental backups. It's easy to set up and that way you save only the things that have changed since the last full backup. Differential backups keep saving the same changed data over and over until the next full backup resets the archive bit. Incremental saves the changed file once and sets the archive bit to reflect the save.

Regards,
David.