Entry tags:
Timeshift and the Fibonacci Death Spiral
Rogan: With the help of my friend, I fixed my computer!
It turns out one of the preinstalled programs on Linux Mint, a system back-upper called Timeshift, went cancerous and started making back-up after back-up of its own back-ups until my Linux partition disk was 100% full. Whenever I deleted files to clear space (which was a challenge, since I had virtually no files of my own on the partition), it would immediately start making another snapshot until it was full again. This is apparently a longstanding problem. (To be clear, I didn't tell Timeshift to do this. I had no idea it even existed, never mind what it did. If it'd asked me, I would've only requested it make ONE back-up, and NOT make back-ups of itself.)
Since I make my own manual back-ups, I just uninstalled the program and deleted the files. PROBLEM SOLVED!
At least it wasn't my hard drive dying! That was what I was REALLY worried about! Though I am a bit alarmed that the only clue I had of my disk filling up (before it reached 100%) came from Privacy Badger, of all things. It proved the canary in the coal mine, letting me know that it had stopped working, and that this error could occur if my disk was getting full. I didn't get any other warnings until the disk was 100% full.
What a weird problem to exist on an OS for 5+ years.
It turns out one of the preinstalled programs on Linux Mint, a system back-upper called Timeshift, went cancerous and started making back-up after back-up of its own back-ups until my Linux partition disk was 100% full. Whenever I deleted files to clear space (which was a challenge, since I had virtually no files of my own on the partition), it would immediately start making another snapshot until it was full again. This is apparently a longstanding problem. (To be clear, I didn't tell Timeshift to do this. I had no idea it even existed, never mind what it did. If it'd asked me, I would've only requested it make ONE back-up, and NOT make back-ups of itself.)
Since I make my own manual back-ups, I just uninstalled the program and deleted the files. PROBLEM SOLVED!
At least it wasn't my hard drive dying! That was what I was REALLY worried about! Though I am a bit alarmed that the only clue I had of my disk filling up (before it reached 100%) came from Privacy Badger, of all things. It proved the canary in the coal mine, letting me know that it had stopped working, and that this error could occur if my disk was getting full. I didn't get any other warnings until the disk was 100% full.
What a weird problem to exist on an OS for 5+ years.