Hard drive randomly full

[bobman321123]

I have two partitions on my 500GB hard drive.
One is 191gb for a windows partition, and the rest goes to ubuntu.
Two days ago, my ubuntu was filled up 23%, and today, it's at ~97%. I haven't downloaded anything significantly sized, what could possibly be going wrong? My windows partition also randomly filled up to near maximum even though I haven't booted to windows in weeks.
Help?

[oldfred]

That is a lot of space to fill.

Do you have any automatic tasks like backup running?

Are you getting some errors and the log files are going berserk?

HOWTO: Recover Lost Disk Space - drs305
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1122670
HOWTO: Cleaning up all those unnecessary junk files...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=140920
Caution deborphan will delete anything you manually installed. See comment:

This will only show mounted partiitons:
Partition sizes
df -Th | sort

#check for large files:
sudo du -h --max-depth=1 / | grep '[0-9]G\>' # folders larger than 1GB
sudo find / -name '*' -size +1G # files larger than 1GB
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name . -exec du -sh '{}' \; | sort -h

[bobman321123]

After following the first two guides, the file systems are at 70% for windows, and 86% for Ubuntu. I can't seem to find any significant drain of space. (I mean sure I have 17 gb here and there for random things on my hard drive, but nothing that would randomly knock off 150 gb in two days.)

[oldfred]

Do you have any large files or large folders from commands given?

[bobman321123]

sudo du -h --max-depth=1 / | grep '[0-9]G\>' # folders larger than 1GB

Tells me that my home folder somehow contains 200GB of files, but when I look through it, it doesn't say what it is.

When I run:

sudo find / -name '*' -size +1G # files larger than 1GB

I found several files, but nothing noteworthy.
I've deleted some of my files, and have my ubuntu partition down to 55%, but I'd still really like to know where that space went in the first place.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name . -exec du -sh '{}' \; | sort -h

Gave me a list of folders and space usage, but I only have ~6 folders that are even over 1GB, for a total of about 50gb, which doesn't really explain where the other 100gb is going.
*sigh* all this after I fix my last computer issue. :P

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

i had a similar issue happen once on ubuntu 9.04 it is a issue with printer making the system go crazy with the log files i used bleachbit to get my space back
you may want to look in /var/log for any multi gig logs and delete them so you will have the pace to install bleachbit

[bobman321123]

/var/log had no large files in it.
At least, I don't think so. I ran the command from the above post...

sudo find / -name '*' -size +1G # files larger than 1GB

modified (I think) to search /var/log, like this.

sudo find /var/log -name '*' -size +1G # files larger than 1GB

[oldfred]

You said your /home was the issue. Then it should not be log files. Did you download any large files, or turn on show hidden files and see if something very large is in /home.

Or you can run commands in every folder in /home.

[bobman321123]

I did a bit of downloading, but my internet isn't nearly good enough to knock out 100gb in 2 days (even if I were to try).

[arclance]

Try running this from /home or any directory you suspect of containing the files.

ls --recursive --all -Slh

ls seems to find more files that the other commands you have been trying, but is not sorted as nicely.

Look through the results for large files or directories containing a very large number of files.
Don't assume that the files you are looking for are 1GB+ in size.
You may have a large number of files under 1GB that add up to the missing space on your drive which will not be listed by one of the commands you ran before.

I know this from experience.....
I once wrote a script that made about 40 GB of text files over two weeks due to an unknown function of calcurse.
I reached the max number of files for a ext4 partition and it took 24 hours to delete them all after figuring out that the "out of space" error I was getting did not differentiate between "max number of files reached" and "no space left on drive".