What do I do when my root filesystem is full?
My / folder is reading as full and I can't update software or do anything.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong here.
$ df -h
Results:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 5.7G 5.4G 0 100% /
udev 1.9G 4.0K 1.9G 1% /dev
tmpfs 770M 1.1M 769M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 1.9G 808K 1.9G 1% /run/shm
/dev/sda6 961M 18M 895M 2% /tmp
/dev/sda7 9.9G 2.9G 6.6G 31% /home
/dev/sda3 5.7G 140M 5.3G 3% /usr/local
/dev/sda4 2.9G 1.3G 1.4G 49% /var
/dev/sdb1 94G 1.3G 88G 2% /sites
/home/username/.Private 9.9G 2.9G 6.6G 31% /home/username
/dev/sdb5 282G 88G 180G 33% /mnt/multimedia
$ df -h /
Results:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 5.7G 5.4G 0 100% /
$ du /mnt /media
Results:
4 /mnt/multimedia
8 /mnt
4 /media
This is a new install of Ubuntu 12.04 and I'm not sure how/why the root system is so full.
Solution 1:
Just to share a magic command to know where all your disk space goes:
sudo du -hsx /* | sort -rh | head -n 40
You end up with a pretty neat report like this:
16G /home
5.3G /var
2.6G /usr
840M /run
277M /root
171M /lib
59M /tmp
25M /sbin
19M /boot
16M /bin
9.6M /etc
136K /ngx_pagespeed-latest-stable.zip
24K /DEBIAN
16K /lost+found
8.0K /media
4.0K /srv
4.0K /opt
4.0K /mnt
4.0K /lib64
Then you can start again from another folder:
sudo du -hsx /home/* | sort -rh | head -n 35
Remove what's not necessary and you should be fine. It's part of my linux cheat sheet
Solution 2:
Some likely measures for an overflowing root partition are (based on cases):
1. Core dumps filling up the disk.
Check with:
find / -xdev -name core -ls -o -path "/lib*" -prune
2. Unnecessary packages filling up the space.
The following command will remove all automatically installed packages, which aren't required any more. (Because the dependency which force the installation in the past has been removed.)
apt-get autoremove --purge
3. Outdated kernel packages
Check how many kernel packages are installed, and remove outdated kernel versions. You may investigate the current situation with:
dpkg -l "linux*{tools}*" |grep ^.i
Remove any kernel versions you doesn't need any more
4. Hidden storage
Other mounted partitions may hide used storage. To investigate this mount the root file system temporary on a second location:
mkdir /tmp/2ndRoot
mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/2ndRoot
Now look on every directory, that is normally hidden by another mount, e.g.:
- tmp
- home
- run
- var
-
usr/local
and in your case also:
- sites
Caveat
Don`t forget to control at the end the consistency of your installation with:
apt-get install -f
Notes
Reserved storage
/dev/sda1 5.7G 5.4G 0 100% /
The output shows that you have still some space, but it seems to be reserved for root. The good point is that your system functionality is currently still be given.
But you should fix the problem soon.
Space consumption of ubuntu 12.04
To have only 5.7 Gb for an ubuntu installation seems to be a bit too little. You should remove some unessential software packages.
My current installations have 10-14 Gb for the root and binary (aka /usr) partitions.
Solution 3:
Another solution would be to use ncdu, eg:
sudo ncdu -x /
Where / is the partition/drive you wanna check. For my example, the result is
4,0GiB [##########] /usr
579,3MiB [# ] /root
487,4MiB [# ] /opt
41,7MiB [ ] /lib
22,7MiB [ ] /sbin
21,2MiB [ ] /boot
18,6MiB [ ] /etc
9,1MiB [ ] /bin
3,6MiB [ ] core
260,0KiB [ ] /build
88,0KiB [ ] /tmp
e 16,0KiB [ ] /lost+found
8,0KiB [ ] /media
4,0KiB [ ] /lib64
e 4,0KiB [ ] /srv
e 4,0KiB [ ] /mnt
> 0,0 B [ ] /var
> 0,0 B [ ] /sys
> 0,0 B [ ] /run
> 0,0 B [ ] /proc
> 0,0 B [ ] /ovhbackup
> 0,0 B [ ] /home
> 0,0 B [ ] /dev
Then you can navigate through the folders using your keyboard arrows and simply press the D key to delete a folder/file.
ncdu can be installed from the apt packaging tool on Debian based systems:
sudo apt install ncdu
Solution 4:
Lubuntu users ?
/home/XXX/.cache/lxsession/run.log
was over 85G of space, they even know about it!