What happens after I run out of HDD?

[Hume2]

I would like to know what happens when my world exceeds the available space on HDD. Will Minetest just crash or the world becomes read-only?

[ShadMOrdre]

Long before your world crashes, your PC should start complaining about low diskspace.

Windows10 will probably slow to a crawl when you duck below about 1 or 2GB of free space. Earlier versions of Windows will dip out at much lower amounts. XP will start to spin the disk in a futile effort to free some disk space. Ultimately, it will crash, and have fun with the consequences of that.

After you run out of disk space? Well, that's an open can of worms.

Before you run out of diskspace, get an external usb drive to store the world.

:)

Shad

[sorcerykid]

^ This is one of the main reasons that I configure multiple partitions, both on my production server and all my home computers. I think I first started this practice around 1991 or so on my Mac SE. I had System, Programs, and and Data partitions. I pretty much kept to that same scheme when I switched over to Windows 95, and have continued ever since.

With a server I think it's even more important to separate data from applications and system software. Currently, I devote an entire tmpfs partition just for storing Minetest worlds as an extra failsafe. Then each night I backup the tmpfs to the HDD automatically. This way the hard drive is never even touched. And most importantly, I can dynamically resize the tmpfs as my space needs change. Of course, RAMdisks are blazingly fast as well, so it's a two-fold benefit :)

As for what happens, when you run out of disk space? I imagine that depends on which database backend you are using. I suspect (and don't quote me on this) that Sqlite3 just continues attempting to commit transactions, but silently fails. So any changed mapblocks probably go into oblivion. It's possibl something is written into the debug log, I'm not entirely sure. But then again, if your debug log is written to that same partition, then you're out of luck. Hence I'd recommend keeping it separate.

[Hume2]

The world is on a separate partition and the logs are stored in a different partition. I use the Minetest's default database backend (i.e. I didn't change it). So if I understand it correctly, the world shouldn't get corrupted after I run out of space and it will just refuse most of changes.

[Linuxdirk]

The world is on a separate partition and the logs are stored in a different partition.

I wish Minetest could use systemd's logging functionality instead of last century text file log without rotation.

[sorcerykid]

I actually began work on a Lua-based map explorer called MapBridge back in April. It's basically a suite of command-line tools that allow for validating, reporting, and visualizing any given range of mapblocks within map.sqlite databases. The scenario you've described would be a perfect test-case for these tools. So, I'll report back on my findings :)

[Hume2]

I've just found that out. Minetest will crash on startup until the space is freed. After enough space is freed, it runs normally.

[56independent_actual]

My server constantly runs out of space. So basically the advtrains interlocking files are lost and the webserver is innaccesible. I just copy from a backup and continue with my day.