The Mystery of the Vanishing Disk Space
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Oddthinking
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Published on 2012-04-10T02:13:48Z
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2012/04/10
5:43 UTC
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disk-usage
|disk-utility
My disk space is dwindling by about 2GB a day! I only have a few more days before I run out of space.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4 143G 126G 11G 93% /
udev 491M 4.0K 491M 1% /dev
tmpfs 200M 696K 199M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 499M 144K 499M 1% /run/shm
/dev/sda2 1.9G 580M 1.2G 33% /tmp
/dev/sda1 92M 29M 58M 33% /boot
I have been searching for the biggest directories/log files, deleting and compressing. But I am still losing the war. Finally, I realised I have a big misunderstanding:
julian@server1:~$ sudo du -h / | tail -n 1
16G /
All of my files in / only add up to 16 GB. That leaves 110 GB unaccounted for!
Clearly I have a misunderstanding: I thought the '/dev/sda4' line represented all the files visible from '/'. What should I be reading to understand where the other storage has gone?
More details:
- I have an Ubuntu 11.10 server, that was set-up by data-center staff.
It is running
- my own code (which is fairly prolific with log files, but otherwise doesn't store much stuff on the drive)
- duplicity for backups (which tends to store a lot of signature files)
- various other standard services, like Apache, nagios, etc. They are very lightly used.
It has been up for about 4 months without a reboot.
I lied about the du output (simplified it for effect). It also complained about not being able to access GVFS and the du processes's own resources. I believe they are irrelevant:
.
du: cannot access `/home/julian/.gvfs': Permission denied
du: cannot access `/proc/10841/task/10841/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/10841/task/10841/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/10841/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/10841/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
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