Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

danan · 2011-09-21 16:15:41

Hi,

I just discovered a major problem: my free space on home is slowly decreasing with time (100MB in a few minutes). There are no downloads running, no programms I'm aware of which could produce trash data. I only wondered, why I had to clean up (copy to my external drive) twice in a row, emptying few GBs of space each time.
Is there a way to find out, where files or data on the disk are created to trace back to the possible source?
It's still decreasing, any quick help is very welcome!

Thanks!
André

karol · 2011-09-21 16:27:07

Use e.g. ncdu to see what's taking up that space, any huge logs?

lolilolicon · 2011-09-21 16:29:40

You can also make use of inotify to see disk activities. Install inotify-tools, then run:

inotifywait -m -e modify -e create ~/

Monitor for a while, while the free disk space is descreasing.
If that didn't find anything, add --recursive to the command but it can take a while to set up. See the inotifywait(1) man page for details.

My guess is some log files too, e.g. ~/.xsession-errors.

Last edited by lolilolicon (2011-09-21 16:31:00)

stqn · 2011-09-21 17:15:59

iotop could be useful too.

danan · 2011-09-21 19:05:44

Hi,

thanks for the quick help. I rebooted it shortly after and the space was free again (15GB were already eaten). Now I started working again, and just noticed the same behaviour. I used your tools, and indeed, xsession-errors is written all the time. But it's hard to identify the reason: there are a lot of errors, relating to different stuff. Can only watch it with 'more', it's even to large for 'vi'. How can I find out the most crucial error?

André

lolilolicon · 2011-09-22 03:51:23

Do you use KDM?
Since the log file is too big to read, either log out and back in for a new smaller log (assuming the log gets deleted when you log out), or use `split` or `truncate` to get a portion of the file.

Google for "xsession-errors" and you will see you're not alone.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-09-21 16:15:41

Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

#2 2011-09-21 16:27:07

Re: Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

#3 2011-09-21 16:29:40

Re: Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

#4 2011-09-21 17:15:59

Re: Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

#5 2011-09-21 19:05:44

Re: Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

#6 2011-09-22 03:51:23

Re: Slowly decreasing free hard disk space

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