Limit consumption of space on destination?

[Anonymous]

I've just started using rsync, and it's way cool.

I checked the FAQ, the broken mailing list archive search function, and
scanned the archives, but didn't see this mentioned.  I presume it's a
fairly common need:

I'm mirroring files automatically and daily from one site to another,
and anticipate the day when the size of the files may exceed the size of
the destination disk.  Rather than take up the whole disk (which is a
root partition) and bring my destination system down, I'd prefer that
the rsync process fail gracefully and not copy files when there's only a
small amount of space left on the destination disk.

I realize I could accomplish this by creating a partition on the
destination disk, but I don't like partitions because changing them
means taking down a production server and reformatting the drive.  I
took a look at quotas, which seem to fit the bill more closely, but
either the documentation out there on them is weak or I'm just not smart
enough to figure out whether they'll give me the assurance I'm looking
for.

How have other rsync users solved this problem?