"E297: Write error in swap file" due to running in a VM

Question

UPDATE: I've tried both the :set noswapfile swapfile solution and the :e! solution and the swapfile one is better because it retains undo history even for large files, in this case meaning over 1.5 MB. For some reason, :e! does not keep undo history in those cases even though it does keep it in the normal case (say sub-100KB). The swapfile solution appears to me now to work under any circumstances, which is very impressive.

A bit of a weird question: How can I cleanly get rid of or move past the error message "E297: Write error in swap file"? I am running GVim when this happens and do not want to be forced to close it down and reopen a new GVim because I don't want to lose all my open buffers and ideally I'd like to keep all my undo history in each file too, but even a solution where I lose undo history would be an improvement. I have one limited workaround right now noted at bottom and am looking for something a little better...

Why would I want to ignore such an error? A good question: I am running GVim in a virtual machine and I have it open on a file on the "host" file system rather than the VM's own file system and I "suspend" the VM. After coming back from the suspend, every GVim window open on a host system file will give this message. So the message is evidently due to the disconnection from the host file system that has to occur when the VM is suspended. GVim obviously thinks it still has a valid perhaps file descriptor and such when it doesn't.

So the way the error arises is not anything alarming and I just need or want a way to move past it without having to close GVim and reopen it. For example, many times I might have this GVim open with many buffers and a lot of things going on. I don't want to be forced to shut down the whole GVim session because of this one error, or even to shut down all buffers open on the host system's file system. When the error occurs, it's quite annoying and pops up every few moments.

What I tried so far is doing :e on the same file, hoping that might be like refreshing from the file system, and that did not get rid of the error.

I have also tried sort of the nuclear option, :bw to get rid of the buffer where this is occurring and that does work, but as I say ideally I would like to keep the session in the same state as much as possible, so shutting down buffers is not ideal either. Like let's say I have GVim open on 10 files on the host system. If I have to shut down all the buffers, then it's just as bad as having to shut down GVim altogether.

All of this applies to the command line Vim as well, and I'm using version 7.4 on Linux.

Answer 1

I would try to globally disable swapfiles and then reenable them for all buffers. Something like this:

:bufdo :set noswapfile swapfile

(One might want to check, whether the current buffer has a swapfile enabled before resetting this option).

Answer 2

I have the same problem with @Jiaming Zhang, no space left on server. So I use df -h to check overall disk usage and use du -sh * to find space of each folder. After I deleted some large directories, it works again.

Answer 3

I had the same error today on a Ubuntu server. It turned out to be no space left on the server. These are the actions I did.

### check the overall disk usage.
df -h

### check the cache folder size.
sudo du -sh /var/cache/apt/archives

### clean the cache.
sudo apt-get clean

### now try again with the file editing and then allocate more space to the disk or clean up the disk.

Answer 4

You could try using sessions instead of suspending the VM. You could configure your Linux to launch Vim on startup, and your Vim to load the last session.

Anyway, for the following task:

I am running GVim when this happens and do not want to be forced to close it down and reopen a new GVim because I don't want to lose all my open buffers

, you could use the session.vim plugin as it provides the :RestartVim command, which restarts Vim/GVim and restores your windows/tabpages layout.

Answer 5

Didn't intend to reply to my own question, and this is not necessarily better than the swapfile method, but this works too:

:w then :e!

I initially tried :e as I mentioned but I hadn't tried :e!. And I still have undo history with :e! (tested only on Vim 7.4), just like with the swapfile solution, but...

The negative with this solution of course is that you will lose any unsaved changes since that's ordinarily the purpose of the exclamation, to say "I don't care if I lose changes since the last time saved," so make sure you use :w before doing this. In these swap file error situations, I am always able to save just fine.

The Vim docs mention that :e! is useful when you want to "start all over again" which is kind of the situation here, though we don't want to needlessly throw away undo history:

:e! Edit the current file always. Discard any changes to the current buffer. This is useful if you want to start all over again.
- :h :e!

Because of the unsaved changes issue, I would say the swapfile solution is overall the more advisable, even though :e! is much quicker to type.

A note on Vim 7.3: I believe you would more likely lose the undo history in 7.3 given a similar situation, since 7.4 has seemed to make improvements in reducing the number of situations where undo history is lost. (Thank you to Bram Moolenaar and whoever else helps him make Vim/GVim better!)