Ubuntu
update-manager package

Uncontrolled file system growth

Asked by D. Ross Brown

I have upgraded to 9.10-64 bit, and find my root partition growing past 163 GB, its size yesterday, to 180 GB today, having done a shutdown overnight. Resized the partition yesterday from 163 GB to over 200 GB, but getting close to my limit. Use of the Disk Usage Analyzer shows files only occupy 20.2 GB, and cannot find where the other occupied space is allocated.

My 8.04 system, dual-boot, does not show this behavior, but I can't take much space from these partitions to use with 9.10.

Any suggestions?

DRB

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D. Ross Brown
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Dominik Stadler (dominik-stadler) said : 		#1

Can you run a file system check on the 9.10 partition when you are booted into 8.04?

Not sure about what "disk usage analyzer" does, but maybe you can run the following in a terminal from within 9.10: "sudo du -sk /*" (without quotes, might run a long time to finish) and paste the result?

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D. Ross Brown (drphysic2033) said : 		#2

Dominik,
Here is what I got:

5964 /bin
14968 /boot
0 /cdrom
1436 /dev
16404 /etc
du: cannot access `/home/doug/.gvfs': Permission denied
17634928 /home
0 /initrd.img
159308 /lib
12600 /lib32
0 /lib64
16 /lost+found
282460 /media
4 /mnt
du: cannot access `/proc/5029/task/5029/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/5029/task/5029/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/5029/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `/proc/5029/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
0 /proc
5680 /root
8852 /sbin
4 /selinux
4 /srv
0 /sys
13936 /tmp
2943780 /usr
166664680 /var
0 /vmlinuz

I assume this means that i have 166 GB in /var, actually in /var/backup, but File Browser says this is empty, and I can't cd into that sub-directory. Can I delete that directory (/var/backups looks fine) and get rid of those invisible files?

DRB
PS: thanks for the help

Revision history for this message
D. Ross Brown (drphysic2033) said : 		#3

I just activated the root account and looked at the "/var/backup" directory, its filled with full and incremental backups, so that was the source of the problem, which I had suspected, but did not throughly check. Now I need to rid myself of the old ones and just keep the most recent...Thanks for the help.

DRB