I signed up with Linode a couple of days ago. It's going great, got my webserver working, everything is humming.

I signed up for backups. I took a manual snapshot. Looked good. I wanted to check if I could restore it, and it says "--not enough free space--". I don't understand.

If I needed to restore it, to revert back to how it was when I took that snapshot, how would I do it? Do I have to erase the linode first? Why would it report "not enough free space" for restore?

The first of my daily backups was made, and it too says "not enough free space". I probably haven't read the right bit of documentation yet, so if you could point me to that, or explain it, I would be grateful.

Yes, you have to delete existing disk images because the restore will create new disk image(s) that are the full snapshot.

Thanks. I will practice this late tonight.

Note that you only need enough free space to hold the restored images, which will generally be smaller than the original (roughly how much space your current images actually used for files, rather than their full size). I believe you're told that size when you try to restore.

Depending on how your space is currently allocated, you may not absolutely have to delete all your existing images, though the worst case would be a single disk image using up the full allocation. In that case you'd have to delete that full image, unless there was enough free space within the filesystem using that image that you could shrink it first to free up the needed space at the Linode level.

Alternatively, if you just want to test the restore process without having to impact your running system, create a new Linode, do the restoration to that, and then delete the Linode (you'll be credited back a prorated amount of your charge from creating it).

-- David