File system bafflement

[R Kimber]

On Tue, 02 Sep 2014 15:41:38 -0400
Paul Smith wrote:

> At some point before you had all those other partitions mounted, you
> created a directory on the root partition with the same name as one of
> your (future) partitions.  Then you added a bunch of files into it that
> are taking up a lot of space (about 3G or so it looks like).  These
> files exist in the root partition.

No I've never personally done that, though something clearly has.  However,
what you say is broadly correct, but I think it was something to do with the
failing disk that I mentioned. This was a USB backup disk mounted
at /media/zip and has worked properly for a very long time using a bash
script and rsync. But in the last couple of days the backups have failed and
the data seems to have been written to /media/zip on the root partition
instead.

I discovered this when I disconected the USB disk, rebooted, and then
inspected /media/zip.  Deleting this directory has freed up the space as
you indicated, though there is still some inconsistency in the reporting of
free space. Running sudo baobab from the command line gives a summary that
says the root system is 28% used (which agrees with df), though when I click
the small triangle for further details the next view says usage is 100%.  So
something is amiss, though I guess that's a baobab issue .

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber