I am running Ubuntu 9.10 Gnome

Reserve Disk Space Before Starting a Torrent is NOT enabled because I often have many torrents loaded waiting to be downloaded when I want them, but I have them a NOT RUNNING condition....or I often have more torrents running than I have disk space....but plan on removing them before that limit is reached. Therefore, Reserve Space in Ktorrent IS NOT enabled.

I have rysnc backing up my primary hard drive each day to a backup hard drive of the same size. I noticed the other day my back up is erroring out due to attempting to overfill my backup drive, and after some investigation, I found that my ktorrent non reserved space on my primary drive is being copied to the backup drive as reserved space....causing my backup to terminate when it when it hits the end of the hard drive space. I discovered this using this command:

du --max-depth=1 -h /home/<user>/ /media/<backupdrive user>/

The result when I did a compare of the information was:

7.4G /home/<user>/Ktorrent

41G /media/<backup user>/Ktorrent

That's 33.6 GB of my backup drive being tied up. I tried erasing my backup drive and doing a manual copy of my home directory back onto it, and obtained the same results.

Is there a way to stop ktorrent space from being reserved on my backup drive?

It's called sparse files, and rsync has an option to handle them (-S), take a look at the manpage.

Thanks George! rsync is so cool. And Ktorrent works so well! I didn't know what this "reserved area" was called.