Question

4

Whats consuming HDD Space

rated 0 times [ 4] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1652 / 2 Years ago, sat, november 5, 2022, 2:13:54

I have single partition of 92GB in which I installed Ubuntu 12.04. And for some Unknown reason a message pop ups saying that I only have 1GB of HDD space left.

I ran command sudo du -hscx * on / and /home

/home gave me this result

4.0K    C:

ppdf32Logdebuglog.txt

0           convertedvideo.avi

176M    Desktop

16K         Documents

169M    Downloads

4.0K    examples.desktop

17M         file.txt

4.0K    Music

984K    Pictures

4.0K    Public

320K    Red Hat 6.iso

2.5M    syslog-ng_3.3.6.tar.gz

4.0K    Templates

8.0K    terminal.png

1.2M    Thunderbird Attachments

698M    ubuntu10.04LTS.iso

16K         Ubuntu One

4.0K    Untitled Folder

4.0K    Videos

21G         VirtualBox VMs

22G         total

And / gave me this result

81G         home

0           initrd.img

0           initrd.img.old

833M    lib

16K         lost+found

68K         media

4.0K    mnt

260M    opt

du:         cannot access `proc/8339/task/8339/fd/4': No such file or directory

du:         cannot access `proc/8339/task/8339/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory

du:         cannot access `proc/8339/fd/4': No such file or directory

du:         cannot access `proc/8339/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory

0           proc

640K    root

908K    run

8.6M    sbin

4.0K    selinux

4.0K    srv

0           sys

148K    tmp

3.3G    usr

436M    var

0           vmlinuz

0           vmlinuz.old

86G         total

If you look at the result returned by / it shows that /home is consuming 81GB but on the other hand /home returns only 22GB.

I cant figure out whats consuming the HDD. I have not installed anything except Virtual Machines

Perpetrator found using Disk Usage Analyzer

DUA

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kilusy

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answered 2 Years ago tocklftime · Accepted Answer

It might be that 'du' lists folders where different partitions are mounted with the partition size and not the actual file usage. But I'm not sure about this.

Try the command "df -h", for file system disk space usage. It will show you the size and usage of different partitions.

You can also use baobab, which gives you a graphical representation. It is installed on ubuntu per default. Just type "Disk Usage Analyzer" into the Unity hud.

Update:

Well, as for why Thunderbird uses up so much space. For one, you could look into the folder, maybe you put some other files inadvertently there.
The folder with the funny name of numbers and letters is a mail profile. The data is held in sqlite database files, so you best not mess with them but just open Thunderbird.
Look for mails with attachments. Use "File->Empty Trash" to finally delete mails from the trash. Use "File->Compact Folders" to optimize and clean up, but that won't bring you gigabytes of space.