[SOLVED] Re: 0 bytes on HD

[Jim Byrnes]

On 04/08/2012 07:22 PM, NoOp wrote:
> On 04/08/2012 08:01 AM, Jim Byrnes wrote:
>> On 04/08/2012 08:42 AM, J wrote:
>>> On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 09:08, Nils Kassube<kassube at gmx.net>   wrote:
>>>>> Would rebooting allow the 4.7GiB to be recognized as available or is
>>>>> a reboot just asking for trouble at this stage?
>>>>
>>>> See above - probably it wouldn't help but it wouldn't make it worse
>>>> either.
>>>
>>> Actually, this could help quite a bit.  I've noticed that when running
>>> out of disk space, evne deleting large numbers of stuff will result in
>>> the same behaviour until a reboot.  What happes is that you may delete
>>> unnecessary files, and while the inodes are freed up, the tables may
>>> not be.  Rebooting will reset the data the system has regarding
>>> exactly what inodes are free and what are in use, thus that "free"
>>> space will become "available" again.
>>>
>>> FWIW, I have a problem with xsession-errors being filled silently to
>>> the point of filling up my HDD... I've actually had a 120GB
>>> xsession-errors file before.  Deleting that one file, because of it's
>>> size, resulted in exactly the behaviour described in the OP, where df
>>> would tell me I had 120GB free, but 0 available,until a reboot.  And I
>>> haven't found a manual way of resetting that.  TIme was, running sync
>>> may have helped the kernel catch up to the actual state of the
>>> filesystem, but it didn't help in my case, so a strait up reboot
>>> worked wonders.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks, for the reply. I have rebooted and now have 3.2MiB free.  See my
>> reply to Nils for details.  Now I am trying to trace down 29GiB I move
>> to trash but some how never showed up there and is still eating up my
>> disk space.
>
> Now that you have 3.2MiB free - install ncdu (its only 94.2kB installed.
>
> $ sudo apt-get ncdu
> $ ncdu
>
> That will show you the directory sizes largest to smallest. See 'man
> ndcu' for additional options. You can also get help by entering a
> question mark '?' when in ncdu.
>
> What do you show for the following:
>
> $ df -h
>
> and
>
> $ sudo du /var | sort -nr | head -10
>
> /var/backup was the issue directory with SBackup. Maybe the same with
> your backup program?
>
> Note: you can do the last on temp&  root as well, just change '/var' to
> whatever else you want.
>
> Also double check your ~/.gvfs directory to see if there is anything
> there. Sometime back there were issues with .gvfs
>
>

Sorry I wasn't able to respond earlier, got tied up with family 
obligations and was away from the computer.  The 3.2MiB gave me some 
breathing room to work with.  Earlier I tried to remove an old VBox but 
I  could not open VBox.  I tried just deleting it and it said it was but 
it turned out not to be true.  Once I got rid of it I had 4GiB to work 
with.  I ran another backup making sure it went to the usb drive this 
time.  Once that was done I burned a gpartd disk and gave myself another 
100Gib to work with.

I still don't know what happened to the 29GiB Back In Time put on my 
hard drive.  I moved it to the trash but it never showed up there though 
it disappeared from Nautilus but I never got the disk space back.  When 
I was doing my second backup I saw this path in it's status bar. 
/.local/share/Trash/files/backintime/20120407-151658/Backup/Home... 
When it was done I followed that path and it was not there.

Frankly the whole thing scared the hell  out of me as I had gotten a 
little lazy with backup and my newest one was two weeks old.  The worst 
part was I had to work from my laptop which I don't like to do and it 
was using Unity which I am having trouble adapting to.

Regards,  Jim

P S  Thanks for the tip on ncdu maybe it will help me track down where 
the backup files ended up.