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After transferring some big files to my VPS I started getting "No space left on device". Even though du -sh / showed I had plenty of space, df -h reported differently:

Filesystem         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ploop15234p1  9.3G  8.5G  315M  97% /
none               512M     0  512M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none               512M     0  512M   0% /dev
tmpfs              512M     0  512M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs              512M  108K  512M   1% /run

What is this dev/ploop15234p1? How do I fix the 97% disk usage?

FWIW, I am uploading stuff to /var/ (Lots of images to serve under html/) but my VPS is supposed to have 40GB yet I am hitting the limit at 9GB. /var/log/ is only using a few MB.

Giacomo1968
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seattleite7
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1 Answers1

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It’s simply a source device for storage on your VPS. You can read up on ploop here:

“ploop is a kernel block device, similar to the traditional loop device (which is controlled by losetup(8)) but with more features added, such as dynamic disk space allocation, stackable images, online resize, snapshotting, and live migration helper (write tracker). This manual page describes the ploop user space tool which is used to perform various operations related to ploop devices and images.”

If you are on a VPS, then /dev/ploop15234p1 is where the storage for root (/) is coming from. All VPS providers provide root storage in different ways and this is one of them I guess.

So instead of being concerned about what that device is — it’s clearly storage assigned to your account — I would instead look through your system from root (/) and see what is taking up space. The simplest way is to run a du (disk usage) command like this:

sudo du -sh /*

That will inventory the disk usage in all directories and files on your system. My guess is whatever is taking up space would be under /var/. If my hunch is right run that command again like this:

sudo du -sh /var/*

Or replace /var/ with whatever directory path seems bloated. But would be willing to say that /var/log/ is what’s filled up with logs taking up space.

How to deal with that is out of the scope of this question, but you will most likely have to delete logs. Might be able to Gzip them as well if you can free up enough space.

Giacomo1968
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