Locating space consuming files

[ChrisRChamberlain]

Hi all

Running Ubuntu server 14.04 headless on a home network and have been allerted by PuTTy that space is at a critical low.


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.6G 12K 1.6G 1% /dev
tmpfs 326M 8.3M 317M 3% /run
/dev/mapper/ecoserver--vg-root 144G 126G 11G 93% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 1.6G 4.0K 1.6G 1% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user
/dev/sda1 236M 42M 182M 19% /boot
/dev/sdb1 147G 2.3G 137G 2% /media/Drive_D
/dev/sdc1 1.9T 477G 1.4T 26% /media/Elements
/dev/sdd1 466G 244G 223G 53% /media/Targa
/dev/sde1 299G 186G 113G 63% /media/Seagate
https://dav.box.com/dav 10G 0 10G 0% /home/chris/box.com
The main drive has little on it as all the media files etc are located on attached desktop drives.

Have deleted old log file files (*.gz), run auto-remove etc, etc but would appreciate guidance as where to look for offending space hogging files?

TIA

[Fire_Chief]

It's fairly quick to do some disk usage scans from the cli. You can start at / and then work your way down one level at a time (for easy reading) to find the offending directory or files.

sudo du -ah --max-depth=1 /Let's say that the largest space usage is shown at /home. You then repeat the command adjusting the target path as needed.
sudo du -ah --max-depth=1 /homeThis shouldn't take too long to identify the source of the disk consumption.

Cheers!

[SeijiSensei]

You can start by running:


cd /
sudo du -sx -X media *

which will report the total size of every top-level directory except /media.

[Graham_Willis]

ChrisRChamberlain, I don't understand what you mean by "The main drive has little on it" as it seems to be 93% full:


/dev/mapper/ecoserver--vg-root 144G 126G 11G 93% /

Second - if the disk was filled to the full or almost to the full, it sometimes happen that deleting files doesn't refresh the total amount of used space correctly. In this case, I recommend reboot & full fsck (don't do it when the filesystem's mounted!).

Third, the command that I'd recommend running as first is (it's possible to craft it even better):

du -sh /* --exclude='/media' 2>/dev/null

It'll automatically exclude /media from checking how much space's used on it, which will save your time (it doesn't make much sense to checking the space used on a mounted file system as it doesn't contribute to overall space used on the root file system).

BTW, it seems that -x option for du doesn't work correctly in Ubuntu.

SeijiSensei: sudo du -sx -X media won't work as media's a directory, at least it doesn't work on my machines. The documentation's actually a little bit unclear on this (in both cases, -X and --exclude, they're speaking about files, but the second works with directories while the first doesn't). However, I'm taking back my words about -x not working, it works correctly. So one simple way to go is: sudo du -shx /* 2>/dev/null. -x will automatically prevent du from traversing into mounted filesystem (just the space used by a directory as if it was umounted's reported, I think).

[ChrisRChamberlain]

Fire_Chief, SeijiSensei and Graham_Willis

Thanks all for your replies.

Using Fire_Chief's suggestion for each directory,
sudo du -ah --max-depth=1 /homethe output was appended to a file for examination.

One early 'villain' found is in
/root/update?host=@&domain=mydomain.com&password=e12345678987654321.999the result of a dynamic IP address update at 4K a time adding up to in excess of 25MB.

Would
sudo rm /root/update?host* resolve that particular issue?

SeijiSensei - your code errored out as suggested by Graham_Willis

Graham_Willis - what I meant was that initially there was very little on the main drive, the desktop drives doing the heavy lifting.

[ChrisRChamberlain]

Thanks to all who contributed to this thread - mission accomplished.


sudo du -ah --max-depth=1 /homeProvided an individual folder view and
du -sh /* --exclude='/media' 2>/dev/nullgave an overall folder view.

Deleting
/root/update?host=@&domain=mydomain.com&password=e12345678987654321.999remains unresolved and will become the topic of a new thread.