What is my .Private folder and why is it full of encrypted files?!

[goemonburo]

I just found that my home dir is full and there's a folder I don't recognize: .Private, filled with encrypted files. Is this normal? Have I been hacked? If so, from what and how should I go about removing this?

I've recently upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04LTS, which was a relatively seamless joy. Really hoping this is just some new folder option and I haven't noticed it before.

Thanks for any/all help!

[oldfred]

You have an encrypted /home.
You should remember that is how you installed & you have to give passphrase everything you boot.

Post these:
sudo parted -l
df -h

Ubuntu, I believe has discontinued a separate encrypted /home as part of install, but it should work with upgrade.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes

The installer no longer offers the encrypted home option using ecryptfs-utils. It is recommended to use full-disk encryption instead for this release. (1756840)

It now uses only LVM withfull drive encryption.
Users have the option of encrypting files, folders or partitions on their own.

[goemonburo]

Okay, so the real question is that when I do df, I see that this .Private folder seems to be filling my entire home dir.

/home/myuser/.Private ....0 space left.

How do I clear/clean this so that I can use the disk?

And thank you, yes, I remember seeing something about not being able to do the encrypted home option. If I look, it indeed is a symlink to /home/.encryptfs/myuser/.Private

What are my options? I really don't want to have to reinstall, gack, that would be such a pain.

[oldfred]

Have you unencrypted it and then checked size?
Otherwise you may need lots of housecleaning.

If you cannot boot:
Includes chroot. /home encryption:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/En...home_directory
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2028865
http://www.howtogeek.com/116297/how-...ory-on-ubuntu/

[goemonburo]

I have hard rebooted fine, several times actually. And when I reboot, it shows my hard drive home with 85 percent of dir space used.

However, now that I've left the system on a few hours, it's already (with nothing that I'm aware of running) at only 87 percent. I normally leave the system on for days or weeks, so I can easily see that by the time I wake up tomorrow, this ".Private" directory will have filled my home dir to the point of instability and I'll be unable to use the computer until I reboot.

As far as "unencrypting" I'm not sure what you mean. When I boot, before I can do anything else (even login) I have to unencrypt the disk. Then it chugs through to a login screen and I log in as whichever user I choose. Then it chugs a bit more and the desktop shows up. When I open a terminal and "df" I see the available space on the various disks and mountpoints.

What disturbs me is that this ".Private" folder just grows and grows. Can I proactively delete its contents? What is filling it with files? Are these logs?

I haven't lost any data, but when the /home/myuser directory is at 100 % of course things get wonky. My worry is that SOMETHING (virus?!) is filling up this space like crazy. I have a 3TB hard drive, so 85 percent should last me for months or years. Instead, it's filling after a day or so.

The links you posted seem to be for when the home directory has been deleted or can't be accessed. I can access it fine, but something's filling up my home directory with files that I don't know and don't understand.

[oldfred]

What brand/model system?
Start with a good backup of all your data.

A lot of this may be system, not user data.
RecoverLostDiskSpace
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoverLostDiskSpace
HOWTO: Recover Lost Disk Space - drs305
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1122670
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=898573
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:

From /home run this:
sudo du -hc --max-depth=1
Then change to largest folder and run again.
Keep drilling down to see if one large file or folder is issue.

Also these may show something:

#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
sudo -H nautilus /root/.local/share/Trash/files # Be sure to enable viewing of hidden files.
sudo du -ahx / | sort -rh | head -20