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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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1 Answer

This may be caused by some application writing to an unlinked temporary file - such files will not show in du output (since they have no entries in any directory) but the application is still able to write to it so the file will grow and take up space.

You can use lsof +L command to find files which have hardlink count of zero and see which process owns the file. Restarting the process should free up the space.

See this answer for a slightly longer explanation

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