Creating Plesk backup to remote storage fails: Not enough free disk space to backup selected objects

Symptoms

• On a Plesk server, creating a backup to remote storage in Tools & Settings > Backup Manager fails:

  PLESK_ERROR: Not enough free disk space to backup selected objects. At least 231208.573798 Mbytes free disk space is required.

  OR

  PLESK_ERROR: Error: There is not enough disk space at /var/lib/psa/dumps to backup creation. At least 945.75 GB free space is required (227.25 GB is available)

• The option Start the backup only if your server has the sufficient amount of free disk space (this option may significantly increase the backup time) in Tools & Settings > Backup Manager > Backup Settings is enabled.

Cause

The Start the backup only if your server has the sufficient amount of free disk space checkbox in Plesk > Tools and settings > Backup Manager > Settings is enabled.

Having this option enabled makes the calculation of disk space for the drive on which /var/lib/psa/dumps resides mandatory before the backup creation is started.

The calculation assumes that the entire backup would be stored locally on the server instead of being uploaded to a remote storage while the process is ongoing, due to which the backup creation will not be started if the drive on which /var/lib/psa/dumps resides does not have a sufficient amount of free space.

Resolution

Allocate additional disk space to or remove unnecessary files in the Plesk backup location - by default, it is /var/lib/psa/dumps on Linux and %plesk_dir%Backup on Windows.

Alternatively, do the following:

1. Log into Plesk

2. Go to Tools & Settings > Backup Manager > Backup Settings

3. Disable the option Start the backup only if your server has the sufficient amount of free disk space (this option may significantly increase the backup time) to make the Plesk Backup Manager not count overall disk space required for the backup at all.

Additional information

How do backups to remote storage (FTP or cloud) work on a server with Plesk?