Shrinking Hard Disk Space?! Need Help!

[mfreeman]

I'm running Linux Mint 10. I have my partitions set up so that / is on a 15Gb partition (small, but fine for what I have installed), /home is on a much larger partition, and /tmp is on a ramdisk. I had about 1Gb of free space on my / partition. Today, I suddenly got a warning that there was about 700Mb left, then a little later, 80Mb. I stopped all running programs, uninstalled some software I didn't need to use at the moment (games) as an emergency measure, and freed up about 1.5 Gb. I continued using the computer, and after a few hours of leaving the computer on, I got another warning that I had about 700Mb left on the partition. I sat and watched for a while, and the drive is steadily losing about 1 to 2 Mb every 30 seconds. What could be causing this? I've never seen this happen before. This is really kind of scary!

[Matti L]

Use Disk Usage Analyzer (in accessories) to see where are the largest folders. Maybe some logs are running wild.

[mfreeman]

Yeah, my syslog was bloating out of control. Not sure what exactly was causing it, but a reboot has stopped it (at least for now). If it returns, I'll post again to give an update.

[DataMan]

You might want to checkout Bleachbit (it's in the repositories). Among it's many features, it does a purge of the rotated logs.

-DataMan