freebsd-update killed my /var

[Ricardo Jesus]

Mel wrote:
> On Sunday 14 December 2008 15:28:16 FuLLBLaSTstorm wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> Recently I've run freebsd-update on my desktop machine, but it failed
>> saying that it cannot save its files anymore to /var because the
>> filesystem is full. now df shows something like this:
>> # df
>> /dev/ad0s1d    253678   250630  -17248   107%   /var
> 
> If this is what I think it is, a 256k /var, then I'm not surprised. Handbook, 
> online tutorials all recommend at least 1G for /var ever since the 4.x days.
> 
> I use 5G, but I save logs for a year.

I faced the same problem last week while trying to update to 7.1-RC1 on 
a disk with 197MB /var.

Here's how I fixed the problem:
# freebsd-update -d /path/to/big/path/directory/ upgrade -r 7.1-RC1
# freebsd-update -d /path/to/big/path/directory/ install

Simply use freebsd-update's -d option. man freebsd-update for more info.