NV+ sudden HD capacity drop - disk full

Is it possible there was a backup job run? iSCSI setup? Time machine backup?

You can check each share capacity by highlighting all the folders in a share and doing a get info.

This NAS is not used for a back up (nor TM) - an external USB HD is used to backup NAS.
There is only 1 share containing 3 folders. The used capacity of all of them is 782.6 GB (this corresponds to about 53% occupancy indicated before.

Connecting as administrator, I can see one additional folder: homes having the following address: afp://NAS-01 (AFP)._afpovertcp._tcp.local/homes/USB_HDD_1.

This contains an admin folder (with one text file "readme") and USB_HDD_1 folder, which is actually my external backup HD.
I don't know whether this is only a link to the external HD or if this has been copied back to NAS. If this is the case, I cannot imagine where this backup loop could come from ... ?
What will happen if I delete the supposed redundant USB_HDD_1 folder ?

You do not want to delete that its a link to your USB drive.

Have you installed any addons?

How big is your external usb drive?

Can you send me your logs via the link in my email.

Actually I took a risk to delete this folder... and it works. The occupancy dropped back to 53% of 1379 GB available (the external USB HD has 1.5 TB capacity).

So there is a return of the backup back to the NAS !?! I deleted this folder from my Mac desktop (no via browser). At the end, there is still a "homes/USB_HDD_1" folder, but it is empty. I cannot delete it (error alert -50).
My concern is how to disable this redundant backup - if this folder cannot be deleted, I wonder if it will happen again.

The system log I got is as follows (not really exhaustive enough):

Fri Jan 14 09:02:12 CET 2011
Volume C is approaching capacity: 100% used 0 available

Fri Jan 14 08:11:54 CET 2011
System power-on scheduled for 01/14/2011 09:00

Fri Jan 14 08:08:20 CET 2011
Error encountered copying data from source path ==> /USB_HDD_1/ due to lack of disk space. [Job 002]

Fri Jan 14 06:25:10 CET 2011
Volume C is approaching capacity: 97% used 48G available

I forgot: none addon

That is fine. Its just a home folder for USB_HDD1

That is odd is the backup job for a share to your usb drive?

The backup just copies the files to the usb it wouldn't use that folder.

I'm back again.....with the same issue. It happened again. Which information can I provide to let you more understand this issue ? The NAS logs are not very helpful (to me at least).

... some additional details of my configuration:

at the shares tab, there are:
- shares at the RAID volume (i.e. NAS): only one specified: NAS-media
- shares at the external USB disk: USB_HDD_1; LaCie Big disk

the second USB share cannot be deleted from this tab. I think it came automatically while configuring it as an external USB volume for backup in the "volumes" menu ???

For which reason the Homes folder at the NAS contains also a folder which name is the same as the USB disk: USB_HDD_1 ?
Where does this loop NAS-USB-NAS comes from ?

any idea ?

Did this ever get resolved? I have the exact same problem on my readynas duo w/500GB (two redundant 500GB HDDs). I actually freed up more than 30 GB yesterday and, lo and behold, it burned through all the space. It appears to me that, with my USB drive missing (I had detached it), the backup job was creating a USB drive in the Home directory and backing up to IT instead. Does that make sense? Seems like a bug to me.

The only thing fixing my issue was to get back to the factory settings (i.e. delete all the NAS data), rebuilt it again and import all the data from my external HD. In place to import them from the HD hung to the NAS (ext3 format), I preferred using a Mac format HD to which I previously back-up-ed all my files.