where did all my space go?

[sjoerdmeijer33]

hello, im here with a problem thats about the harddrive space in my laptop.
all i do on here is download things, and do things for school
im out of place on the hard drive. but there is only about 8 gigs of files in the downloads folder.
and documents dont take that much place.
so my question is, where did it go and how do i find it?
my harddrive is 200 gigs btw.
its also not in the trash

[Impavidus]

Have a look at this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1122670
Which partition gets full? You may have more than one. Which directory consumes all your disk space?

[sjoerdmeijer33]

i only have one, and i can't find what folder does. it almost seems like none.

[codenine75a]

use squashfs, tarballs or whatever. Buy an external drive to store your data or store stuff online. Use google drive.
drive.google.com They offer a free 15GB of space. Hey use Ubuntu one. You get 5GB there.

[sjoerdmeijer33]

thats not what i want, i just want the problem fixed, there is nothing on my hard drive that could take so much space

[drmrgd]

A couple quick things to check:

1. What is the data usage on your file system. From terminal:

df -Th

That will show you which partition is taking up all of the space. It's not impossible, but a bit unusual to only have a system set up with 1 partition. That will help narrow things down a bit.

2. I like to run this command to show me the top 10 largest files in any directory:

du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10

Once you've narrowed down the partitions that has the most data on it, you can try running this from that partition (and any subdirectories) to get an idea of what are the largest files. Probably /home, /var, and /etc would be the first places I would check. You may need to prepend that with 'sudo' if you want to run it from system directories as you'll get a permission denied error. That's usually not a problem as most times you can ignore those files anyway.

That should give you output similar to (this is on my system running from /:

74G     home
6.9G    usr
1.6G    var
1.5G    opt
396M    lib
60M     boot
17M     etc
8.9M    bin
8.7M    sbin
1.5M    root

That should help you get started.

[r-senior]

How many kernels are in the boot directory?

ls -l /boot/vm*

[sjoerdmeijer33]

-rw------- 1 root root 5368560 mei 1 2013 /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-19-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 5373488 aug 22 23:26 /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-30-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 5372944 sep 10 22:28 /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-31-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 5375088 okt 2 00:08 /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-32-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 5375056 okt 23 19:58 /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-33-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 5375472 nov 12 19:34 /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-34-generic
thats what i get when i do ls -l /boot/vm*

[sjoerdmeijer33]

iv'e tried but sort -rh | head -10. don't seem to work or take really long, could you tell me what one is the case?

[drmrgd]

iv'e tried but sort -rh | head -10. don't seem to work or take really long, could you tell me what one is the case?

Depending on where you run it from, it could possibly take a minute or so.

Also, double check that you've typed the command in correctly. What you posted wasn't quite what I put above, and it could be that you're missing the 'du -hsx *' part of the command (in which case the system is just sitting there waiting for input to the next command, sort). It's best if possible to just copy and paste this into the terminal to be sure you got the syntax correct.