Filezilla does not handle low diskspace conditions correctly

[watzo]

OS: Windows XP SP2
Filezilla version: 3.1.0

• steps to reproduce:

• download one or more files exceeding the available disk space

• actual result:

• Filezilla logs the transfer failure in its log pane (Error: error while writing local file)
• the incomplete file(s) are left in the directory
• the transfers do not show up under failed transfers

• expected result:

• the transfers are added to the failed transfers pane
• no remnants of the incomplete file remain in the target directory (in general I would appreciate a more atomic approach to Filezilla's transfers, e.g. first download to a temporary directory, move to final destination after successful transfer).

[Tim Kosse]

• the transfers do not show up under failed transfers

That's the actual bug.

• no remnants of the incomplete file remain in the target directory

Two options for that:

• use temporary directories and move the file
• delete incomplete file

Deleting incomplete file is a bad choice. Imagine you transfer a multi-gigabyte file over a slow connection and near the end the disk becomes full. Lots of wasted time and bandwidth.

The other option is not possible to implement reliable across all supported systems. Moving files around can take a lot of time, if source and target are on different drives, partitions, network shares and so on. Even on Windows, if there's a directory C:\FOO, it might actually be just a mountpoint for drive D:
In other words, it will take a lot of resources to move files from C:\SOMETHING to C:\FOO
Even renaming files in one and the same directory can be an expensive operation, for example if using union filesystems.

[Tim Kosse]

Please try the upcoming 2008-07-26 build from ​http://filezilla-project.org/nightly.php

Reopen if a failed transfer does not appear in the failed tab.