Missing Trash

[Nigel Henry]

On Sunday 05 December 2010 18:07, Christopher A. Lindsey wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 20:55 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
> > On 4 December 2010 20:10, Christopher A. Lindsey <CLindsey at garudallc.com> 
wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm relatively new user.  So, go easy on me...
> > >
> > > I recently encountered a problem with my Ubuntu 10.10 system with
> > > regard to the trash/file system.
> > >
> > > I setup sbackup to do daily backups and keep 10 days of backups.  I was
> > > running out of disk space.  So, I copied the older backups off to
> > > another machine.  I then attempted to delete them from my system.  As
> > > my standard user account did not have adequate permissions I ran
> > > nautilus as administrator.  I was able to delete the files, however,
> > > when I attempted to go into trash to completely remove them I received
> > > an error and no files were displayed.  I did not capture the error
> > > message as I was to quick to click to try again.  I restarted the
> > > machine and reloaded nautilus as administrator and was able to access
> > > the trash. However, no files are listed.  But, the space that was
> > > allocated has not been freed.
> >
> > If they are of substantial size, which I am guessing they may be as
> > the purpose of the exercise was to free up disk space, you could run
> > Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyser, scan initially home,
> > and if necessary the whole machine, and look for a folder that is much
> > bigger than it should be.
> >
> > Colin
>
> Hi Colin,
>
> Thanks for your reply.  I have tried that and I just tried it again.
> Here are the results:
>
> Total Filesystem capacity: 35.3 GB (used: 32.3 GB available: 3.0 GB )
>
> Results of Scan Filesystem:
> Folder "/" Usage 100% Size 10.6 GB Contents 21 items
>
> So, it appears to me that the space has not been released but it is not
> assigned to any files.
>
> Any additional ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Chris

Hi Chris.

I had a similar problem like yours a while back when running in admin mode and 
wanting to get rid of unwanted files. This was using KDE's konqueror in 
superuser mode. I deleted, or thought I'd deleted the files, but they had 
been sent to /root's trash bin, rather than being totally deleted. I found a 
way to bypass root's trash bin later and got rid of the files completely.

So have a look in root's trash can at  /root/.local/share/Trash, there should 
be 2 empty folders "files" and "info" if there's no trash, but you may find 
your trash there.

All the best.

Nigel.