M365 Backup/Recovery Fails Due to Temp Folder Limit

Product version: 11.1

Last modified: 02 June 2025

Problem

During backup and recovery jobs from Incremental with Full repositories for Microsoft 365 objects, data is initially written to the Transporter’s temporary folder before being transferred to the Repository. If this temporary folder lacks sufficient free space, the job may fail.

Background

The default Transporter temporary folder path is /opt/nakivo/transporter/java/tmp. You can customize this path with system.transporter.modern.arguments parameter:

Parameter Value

Temp Folder

Applies To

Performance
-DtempPath=/path_to_temp_folder (default) Yes (default path) Backup & Recovery Optimal
-DoneDriveDirectSend=true No (RAM only) Backup only May be reduced
-DoneDriveDirectSend=false Yes Backup only Standard

Solution

To prevent job failures or degraded performance:

  1. Ensure the Transporter temp folder has sufficient free space:

  • The Transporter temp folder must have more free space than the combined size of the 3 largest backup items (/opt/nakivo/transporter/java/tmp by default).

  • An additional 1 GB of free space is recommended for metadata and buffer operations. If free space is not restored after the backup completes and the CTR write queue is empty, the system may automatically switch to direct streaming using a small RAM buffer. This fallback mechanism can reduce performance.

  1. If disk space is limited:

  • Mount the temp folder to a larger volume. To use a different location with more available disk space, update the following parameter:

system.transporter.modern.arguments = -DtempPath=/path_to_temp_folder

Note

This configuration applies to both backup and recovery operations and maintains optimal performance.

  • Enable direct streaming with awareness of potential performance decrease. To completely bypass disk usage and store backup data in RAM during transfer to the repository, update the following parameter:

system.transporter.modern.arguments = -DoneDriveDirectSend=true

Note

This configuration applies to backup operations only and sends data directly to the repository without saving it to disk. It may cause performance degradation, especially with large files or limited RAM.

  • To revert and use the temp folder again, set:

-DoneDriveDirectSend=false

  1. Regularly monitor free space, especially when handling large or multiple backup jobs.