[Novalug] full root partition problem

Anthony Soucek monkeywrenchit@gmail.com
Fri Oct 17 07:48:39 EDT 2008


I would try booting to a live operating system cd and view the file
system from that OS.  Normally when this sort of thing happens with a
backup, you have told the back program to backup the location where
the backup is being stored, so as the backup grows, the backup grows,
like the dragon eating its tail. I see this if I ask the microsoft
backup to backup everything on the pc including the external drive I
am backing up to...

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:33 PM, Peter Larsen
<plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 23:07 -0400, Roger W. Broseus wrote:
>> I'm getting a report that / is nearly 100% full. It is on a separate
>> partition that is 19 GB. This occurred after I tried doing a backup with
>> Simple Backup under Ubuntu.
>
> First of - LVM would have made things a lot easier for you. There really
> isn't a reason NOT to use it anymore.
>
>> The combined size of
>>      bin, dev, etc, initrd, lib, mnt, opt, proc, sbin, srv,
>>      sys, tmp. usr,var, initrd.img, initrd.img.old,
>>      vmlinuz and vmlinzu.old
>> is 4.5 GB.
>
> What does "du -sh /" report?
>
>> I have the following on separate partitions: /boot and /home.
>
> So /tmp is part of / - that's most likely where you're having issues.
>
>> I can not find what is eating up all of that disk space on / but it
>> appears to have happened when I ran Simple Backup, which seems to be a gui
>> for gzip.
>
> du is your friend. du = disk usage. It will report where things are
> allocated. There's actually a very cool gnome tool called Baobab - a
> disk usage analyzer. It makes a very interesting layout of your data.
>
> To see where data is allocated, you simply do: du -s /*
>
> It should list all directories/files in root and their summarized size.
>
>> I've searched for a large file or folder but am at a loss to find the
>> offending "stuff."
>
> You're most likely having "temporary" files all over the place. But it
> really depends on what you asked the "simple backup" program to do. So
> once you know where disk is allocated, you may still have to revisit
> your backup job.
>
> --
> Peter Larsen <plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com>
>
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>



-- 
Anthony Soucek



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