I have a newly setup Dell file server with a 500gb main drive, and 3 500gb drives in a raid 5 array.

When I try to do the Suse 10.2 backup of the main 500gb drive (OS) to the 1tb data partition, I run out of room in the /tmp space. The backups do make it to the 1tb partition but I always run out of room in the /tmp space in the morning. The /tmp partition is 10gb, and was created at setup.

How to you perform the backup?

With the software that comes preloaded with Suse 10.2

A name would be nice. Kdar comes with SuSE but I don't know if it is preinstalled.

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Or are you referring to YaST?
If you are using the YaST2 backup program, under the backup options -> expert options, you can select a different location for temporary files. One other thing that might help is if you fragment the backup archive into chunks (This is a guess).

Is the backup successful? If so, determine which files were created in /tmp, by looking at the names and when they were created and delete them.

I looked in the sysconfig editor and didn't see an option dealing with regular backups.

Perhaps, if future backups are incremental, there will be less to be backed up and you won't have the problem.