Help! Timeshift ate my Root (/) partition's free space!

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2013-12-11 at 21:29 +0200, Amichai Rotman wrote:
> The main Timeshift window has no snapshots to delete, so I want to
> delete the contents of the /timeshift/snapshots/.sync/ folder, but I
> am not sure if it's a copy or a hard link - thus deleting it will
> delete the actual system (i.e.: /bin, /boot, etc.)

First, if everything was a hard link it wouldn't take up any extra
space, so if you ran out of space they must be copies, not hard links.

Second, deleting a hard link does NOT delete the "actual system file".
The file on the system will only go away when the last hard link to that
file is gone.  Deleting one link to that file doesn't impact any other
links to that file.

Note symlinks are entirely different and work entirely differently, so
don't try to extrapolate this understanding to soft links (or you'll be
sorry).

> Anyway I can make sure it's not a hard link?

If you run "ls -l" the number of hard links will show.  If it's "1",
then this is the only hard link to that file.  If it's >1, then there
are multiple hard links to the file.  But as above, it doesn't matter.

psmith at pdsdesk:~$ touch foo

psmith at pdsdesk:~$ ls -l foo
-rw-r--r-- 1 psmith psmith 0 Dec 11 14:35 foo
           ^ # of links

psmith at pdsdesk:~$ ln foo bar

psmith at pdsdesk:~$ ls -l foo bar
-rw-r--r-- 2 psmith psmith 0 Dec 11 14:35 bar
-rw-r--r-- 2 psmith psmith 0 Dec 11 14:35 foo
           ^ # of links

psmith at pdsdesk:~$ rm bar

psmith at pdsdesk:~$ ls -l foo
-rw-r--r-- 1 psmith psmith 0 Dec 11 14:35 foo
           ^ # of links