What the heck is eating up my hard drive space?

[louisgag]

...

What I found:

.xsession-errors.old

:

Thanks for that hint, my .xsession-errors was taken 2.8 gig, guess we had the same problem.. I just deleted it right away.

Thanks!


-Louis

[Th3Professor]

I'm still having problems with HDD space running low, only now my xsession file is not the cause.

[drs305]

I don't know what your specific problem is, especially if it's in a home folder called .Private. Normally lost disk space is caused by backups made on the Ubuntu partition rather than a backup one, undeleted trash (including root's) and large log files. But I don't know how these issues would relate to .Private.

In any case, perhaps you can use the commands or other techniques from this thread to help troubleshooting:
HOWTO: Recover Lost Disk Space

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

have you checked /var/log for multi-gig files?

[lolipop.]

var/log definitely a problem!
1.Delete large Logs.
2.Disable all logging through BootUp-Manager
(Due to some crazy frenzy of loging of the system that might be having problems Handling or else...
3.Your Firewall might under constant Attack and Log like crazy -limit! or disable ...

4. Your .Private folder will hold the identical size in Gigs to your System and Home folders
Due to Encryption when you chose to activated it and encrypt your system at the time of installation ... of the System (for a while works fine then as a resoult - out of Space)...

Disable Loging - Will give you Pure size in gigs- no more eating!!!
Deleting the .Private folder wont Help - you give it all up for encryption of all your folders of system and Home... (Reinstall with no incryption-best for limited HD)

Use Disk Usage Analyzer in Accessories to navigate to all your large (that includes hidden) folders -open folder - Delete through sudo nautilus dump the folder there in the terminal - enter!

Boom-Bam & Done.

PS, also see to your root Trash Bin! There might be large stuff stored there ....
That is sure thing - indefinitely.
Cheerios

[spillemw]

I had the same problem that something is eating my disk space. I recently installed Ubuntu server 10.04 and overnight my disk space grew from 15% used to 100% used.
Below a screen shot of df output AFTER I solved the situation (after much cursing).
As you can see the /dev/mapper/orion-root shows 6% now, where it showed 100% just a moment ago. None of the other mounts showed anything more than what they show now. However, I did have a lot of other mounts on remote filesystems and 2 USB disks, all mounted in the /mnt directory.
First thing i did was to unmount the remote samba disks (my NAS). That did NOT help, but through the command "du" I did establish the /mnt directory was the culprit, in particular the USB disks. Each USB disk is a 1 TB disk that I use to backup my filesystems. For some reason, /dev/mapper/orion-root seemed to believe that the data on that USB disk was actually part of the 72 Gig hard disk of my server, so the 72 Gig of that disk were swallowed by /dev/mapper/orion-root.
I unplugged the USB disks. For some reason that still was not the final thing to do as the mounted directories still showed the same disk space usage. So without the USB disks plugged in, I had to rm the /mnt directories in which the USB disk had been mounted.
That immediately solved the issue.

I assume this is an LVM bug. Can anyone tell me how i can possibly solve this? I would prefer to use these cheap USB disks for backup again.



Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/orion-root
75945056 3774316 68312924 6% /
none 508484 252 508232 1% /dev
none 513088 0 513088 0% /dev/shm
none 513088 360 512728 1% /var/run
none 513088 0 513088 0% /var/lock
none 513088 0 513088 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda1 233191 31581 189169 15% /boot

[drs305]

For some reason, /dev/mapper/orion-root seemed to believe that the data on that USB disk was actually part of the 72 Gig hard disk of my server, so the 72 Gig of that disk were swallowed by /dev/mapper/orion-root.
I unplugged the USB disks. For some reason that still was not the final thing to do as the mounted directories still showed the same disk space usage. So without the USB disks plugged in, I had to rm the /mnt directories in which the USB disk had been mounted.
That immediately solved the issue.

I assume this is an LVM bug. Can anyone tell me how i can possibly solve this? I would prefer to use these cheap USB disks for backup again.

Are you sure data was not actually written to your system partition in the /mnt folder? This can happen when backups are erroneously made when the backup partition isn't mounted. The backup is written to /mnt but without the backup partition being present the data is written directly to root's /mnt partition. Thus even when the USB device is removed the data remains on the system partition.

[spillemw]

Ouch. That must have been it.

What is the smiley for "shamefaced" ?

[drs305]

Ouch. That must have been it.

What is the smiley for "shamefaced" ?

Might be this one:



But no worries - something like this has happened to all of us at some point. As far as making backups on /, it occurs often enough I wrote a thread about how to troubleshoot it.

Happy Ubuntu-ing !

You can mark this SOLVED via the 'Thread Tools' link at the top right of the first post if desired.