12.04: File System Full - What's Taking all the Space?!

[The Bright Side]

Hey guys,

I have 8 GB on my SSD reserved for Ubuntu (my home folder is on my second hard disk and has 1 TB). Since I started using Ubuntu in March 2009, 8 GB has always been way more than enough - Ubuntu used to take up 4.5 GB at most.

Now, all of a sudden, it's taking 7 GB and I only have 650 MB left to work with. It's making all my applications crash because they don't have enough space left to operate. Ubuntu Tweak even crashed when I ran the Janitor to clean stuff up.

I don't know what's taking all this space all of a sudden! I've been doing a lot of video and audio transcoding / ripping DVDs, so I guess some of those programs took the liberty to place their temporary folders in the root file system:

- Audacity
- K9Copy
- MKVmerge (mkvtools)
- Handbrake

What can I do to free that space back up? And why do they use it to begin with? I thought it was only for system programs and super admin users and stuff.

Help!!

[mamamia88]

Hey guys,

I have 8 GB on my SSD reserved for Ubuntu (my home folder is on my second hard disk and has 1 TB). Since I started using Ubuntu in March 2009, 8 GB has always been way more than enough - Ubuntu used to take up 4.5 GB at most.

Now, all of a sudden, it's taking 7 GB and I only have 650 MB left to work with. It's making all my applications crash because they don't have enough space left to operate. Ubuntu Tweak even crashed when I ran the Janitor to clean stuff up.

I don't know what's taking all this space all of a sudden! I've been doing a lot of video and audio transcoding / ripping DVDs, so I guess some of those programs took the liberty to place their temporary folders in the root file system:

- Audacity
- K9Copy
- MKVmerge (mkvtools)
- Handbrake

What can I do to free that space back up? And why do they use it to begin with? I thought it was only for system programs and super admin users and stuff.

Help!!

do you have a bunch of ram by any chance?
you could try moving /tmp to ram http://askubuntu.com/questions/17309...ount-of-ram-us a separate /var partition might also help. that's about all i can think of. 8gb isn't much to work with

[deadflowr]

Run disk analyzer on the file system, then look and see which folders and files seem to be eating up unnecessary space, proceed from there.

[Wim Sturkenboom]

I agree with deadflowr; I'm more a command line person so I would use du --max-depth=1 -h / and take it from there. One thing that helps me is to clean out apt's cache (on a regular basis).

sudo apt-get clean

[lildigiman]

Have you emptied your trash recently? Having a trash bin growing over time has been a problem for me sometimes, I've cleared up a few GBs of space by emptying my trash before. Depending on your system it you may see trash in nautilus or on your desktop etc...

[bryanl]

Also, check the preferences in the programs you are using to see the folder they use for temporary files. That is often in /tmp and you can change it to a folder that has more free space.

As for system cruft, take a look at Ubuntu Tweak. see https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-tweak - its Janitor will clean up a lot of stuff.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the root drive has some reserved space (5%) that can only be used by privileged processes. See 'man tune2fs' for this. The -l option should list parameters that can be changed.

[The Bright Side]

Hey guys!

Thanks for all the advice. I did find out that the culprits were mostly in the "tmp" folder, and I changed the temporary folder location for the apps I'm using. I'm now back to 3.8 GB free, with 3.6 usable, which is the amount I've had for years. Works great!

Thanks again. Thread solved.