Help! Disk space misteriously missing!

[Rehdon]

Hi all,
I have a secondary partition were I moved some of my stuff (Thunderbird mail database, stuff I work on etc.) which is about 40GB in size: starting from about a week disk space has been constantly decreasing for no apparent reasons, I've deleted quite a bit of old cruft but it didn' help much. The very strange thing is that if I select all folders (including the hidden ones like .Trash) and check how much disk space is needed by them it's 15,6GB: where's all the free disk space gone??? there should be about 24GB of free space, atm I can only see 1.6 ...

Any help greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

Rehdon

[karlchen]

Hello, Rehdon.

Launch baobab, point it to the partition in question and let baobab analyze which folder occupies how much space. Hope this helps find the space eater.

Kind regards,
Karl

[Rehdon]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately Baobab just confirmed what I noticed by just confirmed what I noticed by calculating folder space with Nautilus: that part of the disk space is missing. In fact according to Baobab the partition is 31.9GB big, according to GParted it's 39.11GB, according to the Disk Analyzer it 42GB ... I know that the file system reserves about 5% but this is really too much >_<

I wonder if I should just copy all my stuff elsewhere and then reformat this partition.

Rehdon

[DrHu]

In fact according to Baobab the partition is 31.9GB big, according to GParted it's 39.11GB, according to the Disk Analyzer it 42GB ... I know that the file system reserves about 5% but this is really too much >_<

And some additional information may help

• What is the format for the partition with the disappearing space ? or simply less space (size) than you expect to see
  btfs, ext4 ntfs ?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoverLostDiskSpace

Using the command

Code: Select all

df
du

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/l ... skmon.html\

Will give you the list of directories/files and their sizes, you can then see exactly what is taking up the system space in your OS.
http://www.labtestproject.com/linuxcmd/du_command.html
http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/tutori ... mmand.html

As to mysteriously disappearing file space being used up
--the OS is not acting mysteriously, using the system tools available to you should enable you to determine where storage space is being used (up) and therefor how to reacquire any you don't need to use up (for applications etc..)

[Rehdon]

DrHu,
thanks for all the info! The partition is in ext4 format, I can see exactly what uses disk space thx to baobab and other tools, the problem was (see below) in the difference between the total disk space and the used space + free space total: the two don't match.

A friend of mine told me that I should discount about 5% of disk space used by the file system, and furthermore a little space waste for every file: since that partition holds about 50k files, that might be enough to explain the difference. Hope that's the case, not doing anything for now

Rehdon