Ubuntu 12.04 constantly out of space

Question

I am having this strange problem of my system running out of space constantly. Just yesterday I cleaned up near 15GB of space and today I see it is out of space. I really don't get it. I know some other people also have this problem, but its not .xsession-log. Infact my /var/log is quite small.

Here is a screenshot of my disk. I ran it as root. enter image description here

Here is my df

[eeuser@roadrunner ~]$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5       178G  169G  2.2M 100% /
udev            7.9G  4.0K  7.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           3.2G  940K  3.2G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            7.9G  2.9M  7.9G   1% /run/shm

What seems strange is, disk-analyzer shows usage of / as 100% but only 74.4GB. I have the linux partition of 190GB. Where is my 100GB.

[eeuser@roadrunner ~]$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0dc6f614

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848   921806847   460800000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       921806848  1541421152   309807152+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4      1541423102  1953523711   206050305    5  Extended
/dev/sda5      1541423104  1919993855   189285376   83  Linux
/dev/sda6      1919995904  1953523711    16763904   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Umm... are you aware that your user files are the ones that are using the most disk space, not the system? Try moving /home to it's own partition and see how it behaves. OH, forgot to add, where are you mounting that NTFS partition? — Braiam, Sep 24 '14 at 03:00
but home is just 50GB and that is perfectly ok. There are no suspicious files in it. I dont understand where the 174-50 GB is — mkuse, Sep 24 '14 at 03:03
Do you perhaps have a large number of small files in your home directory tree? The extra space might be slack space. — Greg Hewgill, Sep 24 '14 at 03:18
This smells like deleted files still open. Does a reboot end up freeing the space? — phemmer, Sep 24 '14 at 03:24
reboot freed up the space, now I have 100GB free space. Open files where the problems I guess....! thanks patrick — mkuse, Sep 24 '14 at 03:48
Marking as a duplicate of this question so we can close it. However some other relevant information: is this question, this question, and this question. — phemmer, Sep 24 '14 at 04:50

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 24 '14 at 03:36

du is your friend in cases like this. I usually use du -sh * from the top level of a partition or directory tree that I'm concerned about. the -s summarizes the size of the subdirectories. The -h creates human-readable output, meaning sizes in KB, MB or GB instead of really long numbers that you have to try to parse.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 24 '14 at 03:40

0

Go to your home directory and run

du -mad 1 | sort -n

to see what eats your space and remember that if you just deleted some files you may need to close all programs which still use them (e.g. mplayer) to actually free this space.

answered Sep 24 '14 at 03:40

jimmij

47,140

Ubuntu 12.04 constantly out of space

2 Answers2