[Tfug] disk usage mystery..

[erich]

Just a suggestion.
                When i discovered its usefulness. I made sure all of my 
machines had xxdiff installed.
Capture the output of du into a file. Change the circumstances. Then 
recapture another du
ouput. Now use xxdiff to compare the two files. The trick is to have 
handy a tool that will
sift thru a large output and detect  subtle differences.

                                                                        
                                                                        
  Erich
          
JD Rogers wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I've got a weird disk usage situation. I have about 1GB free on my
> laptop at boot according to "df -h". After running for a day or so, I
> get a friendly ubuntu warning that I have only 20MB free and "df -h"
> reports 100% used (I have ext4 tuned to keep only 2GB for root, but
> user space is filled). The tricky bit is that I can't see where this
> disk space is going.
>
> Since I noticed a reboot will reset back to about 1GB free, I
> suspected something in /var like logs or maybe tmp or cache files in
> the user home dir. However, "du -h --max-depth=1" in any of these
> suspect places turned up no more than a few MG difference from at boot
> time. In fact, I even did "du -h --max-depth=1 > duatboot" and waited
> a until my disk was full, did it again and diffed the outputs. To my
> surprised, the entire disk is essentially the same. So where is the
> disk usage going!?
>
> Now granted, 1GB free is not ideal these days, but I go through a lot
> of data and only move it off to my workstation when I need to free up
> space or move to another project. Running around 1GB free has worked
> fine for the past year or so, and this behavior has only showed up in
> the past few weeks.
>
> Anyone have any insights or suggestions?
>
> ubuntu 11.10 updated
> ext4, encrypted home with ecryptfs
> swap is on a separate partition
>
> Thanks,
> JDR
>
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