[rdiff-backup-users] Huge rdiff-backup.tmp files

[Chad Parry]

My backups are failing frequently (although not every time) because my disk gets filled with large tmp files. The tmp files are always called something like "rdiff-backup.tmp.*" and they contain only the null character "\0." I'm using the latest stable version of rdiff-backup, from the Ubuntu 12.04 package.

> address@hidden:~$ rdiff-backup -V
> rdiff-backup 1.2.8
> address@hidden:~$ find . -name 'rdiff-backup.tmp.*' -execdir ls -l {} \; -execdir hexdump {} \;
> -rw------- 1 archive archive 51846217728 Aug 12 23:08 ./rdiff-backup.tmp.140
> 0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
> *
> c12468000

The backup doesn't fail until disk space is exhausted. No other messages are written to my logs. I recover by manually removing the tmp file every time this happens.

Is this a known bug? Is there a good workaround? Thanks.