Low disk space

Posted on October 4, 2007 | Category: low disk space

One of the reasons I’ve been preparing to move /home to a new partition is that disk space had become dangerously low.
The crunch came yesterday when out of the blue Open Office and Firefox started behaving erratically. Having deleted a lot of trash, I thought I had about 300Mb to spare, but the odd behaviour including loss of work in Open Office sent me to investigate and I discovered that the system was reading 0% disk space.

Ooops! I thought this was going to be a long night, but oddly enough it was solved in about 5 minutes, thanks to another Ubuntu blog called Ubuntu Linux Journey. As it happens, Ubuntu Linux Journey started at almost the same time as Ubuntu Learner, with much the same aim – to chronicle a new user’s experience with the practical everyday use of Ubuntu. The author is more technically adept and considered than myself, however. If you’ve read anything here, you’ll know that it’s written mostly in haste, recording something just learned without much reflection. It’s really a quick and dirty record in case I come across the same thing again.

Anyway, the initial steps were

Applications>Accessories>Terminal

sudo aptitude clean

(cleans out archives)

sudo du -sh /*

(shows file space usage by application)

I skipped Ubuntu 7.04, so Ubuntu Linux Journey was writing about this version (Feisty), but the results of the above were exactly the same in that the missing disk space had been eaten up by /var/backup, in my case by 2.2Gb.

That’s a lot of diskspace.

I didn’t keep the code so I’ll use that of Michael on Ubuntu Linux Journey. What he did was this.

My disk eater was 8.2G /var, I needed more information so I typed in

sudo du -h /var

and got this:

7.9G /var/backup/2007-01-22_22.11.51.797882.michael-laptop.ful

(the disk eater)

To remove it I typed in the following (still in the terminal):

sudo rm -r /var/backup/2007-01-22_22.11.51.797882.michael-laptop.ful

You simply copy the /var/backup line that you get when you enter sudo du -h /var You’ll recognise it straight away.

That erased the problem, and now he’s back with 10G of additional space on his drive,
and I’m back with 2.2G on mine. He spent three hours looking for the solution, but thanks to him I only spent 5 minutes on my problem. Thanks, Michael!

Ubuntu Feisty Low Disk Space

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One Response to “Low disk space”

Arindam Says:
August 10th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Thanks a lot! I had exactly the same problem – 12GB which seemed to have vanished – and your post solved it perfectly.

Again, thanks a great deal! It’s great to liberate twelve gigabytes.