Used space on /home partition

[BrooksJohn]

My /home directory is mounted on a 2.1GB partition.

If I view the directory properties with nautilus the contents total 432.8MB and the free space is 527.5MB

df -ah shows the following:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 2.1G 1.6G 531M 75% /home

The free space is more or less the same so it seems that there is approx 1.2GB of files that I can't "see" even as root.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[Husse]

Which file system do you use. Which hard drive and how old is your computer?

[BrooksJohn]

ext3, TOSHIBA MK4026GA, 3 years old but new Mint install about 3 month ago.

[Husse]

It does not look as the hardware should be a problem. In Linux the difference between a hidden file and a normal file is the dot in the beginning of the file name so there are no "hidden files" that could lurk in your /home and not be seen.
This is clearly not right, but I guess nautilus shows the wrong numbers somehow.
Try to pinpoint what part of your /home that has the content - check the numbers for each subfolder (remember hidden files and folders) and study that folder

[BrooksJohn]

I was unable to identify what was using the space but have fixed it by copying the contents of /home elsewhere, formatting /dev/sda1, then copying /home back.

Both nautilus and df now show the same (correct) free space.

I suspect the culprit was picasa which crashed a couple of days ago and seems to have left thousands of files in .thumbnails.

Thank for your speedy response.

[Husse]

Unfortunately when things like that happens it is often a "deeper" problem only possible to solve by tough measures.
You explanation is reasonable but the question remains why this was not seen. Keep an eye on that disk/partition and it could be a good idea to run a hard disk diagnostic tool