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On my ubuntu 11.10, /dev/sda3 (150GB) is mounted on / and /dev/sda1 (80GB) is mounted on /home. My entire disk has 250GB and the system is reporting I am running out of disk space. Here is the output of df -h:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             149G  141G     0 100% /
udev                  3.9G  4.0K  3.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs                 1.6G  860K  1.6G   1% /run
none                  5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                  3.9G  508K  3.9G   1% /run/shm
/dev/sda1              74G   15G   56G  21% /home

Ubuntu disk usage analyzer report the same thing. But this is weird because I believe I never used that much space on /. I also checked every individual directory under / ( exclude /home ), and they don't use that much space:

8.8M    bin
4.0K    dev
0       initrd.img
0       initrd.img.old
828M    lib
15M     lib32
4.0K    lib64
4.0K    media
0       proc
9.2M    sbin
0       sys
1.1G    var
108M    boot
18M     etc
4.0K    mnt
40K     root
4.0K    selinux
72K     tmp
0       vmlinuz
0       vmlinuz.old
16K     lost+found
133M    opt
1004K   run
4.0K    srv
5.9G    usr

Any one could give me some ideas what is using up the space? Thanks in advance.

qkhhly
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1 Answers1

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Why did you exclude your home directories from the 'du' output?

You're getting out of space with approx 7G showing remaining because you're a user, and root reserves (by default) 5% of drive space. This allows root to perform maintenance when the drive is "full". 5% of 149G is ~7.5G. (This can be changed and checked with tune2fs)

Something has used the space, and based the output you show, it's obviously in your home directory.

du -scm /home/*

Will show the usage for each user's home directory, (probably just yours though).

Once in your home directory, try this to get an idea of where the space is:

shopt -s dotglob             # makes * include the .dot files/dirs too
du -scm * | sort -n          # gathers the info, sorts so biggest at end of list

That will show you what's being used in your home directory. The shopt command is important, as it makes the * (wildcard) include the hidden dot files. Without it, you wouldn't be shown the hidden files and folders. (my .kde is approx 350M, mostly because of nepomuk (which I disable file searching after it's done with initial scans) )

Midnight Commander (type mc at a prompt) is good to run around the filesystem with to see what's there. Press ALT+. to toggle hidden files on and off (there's a menu option too, but this is easier)

lornix
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