[xubuntu-users] Free Disk space issue

[Petter Adsen]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 16:06:51 -0800
"John R. Sowden" <jsowden at americansentry.net> wrote:

> The process makes sense, although 5% of a 3TB drive sounds like
> overkill.

You can set the percentage to whatever you want with 'tune2fs'. From
the man page:

 -m reserved-blocks-percentage
        Set the percentage of the filesystem which may only be allocated
        by  privileged  processes.   Reserving some number of filesystem
        blocks for use by privileged processes is done to avoid filesys‐
        tem  fragmentation,  and  to  allow system daemons, such as sys‐
        logd(8), to continue to function correctly after  non-privileged
        processes  are  prevented  from writing to the filesystem.  Nor‐
        mally, the default percentage of reserved blocks is 5%.

If you install from the server image I believe there is a separate
field for specifying the percentage of reserved space when you prepare
the file systems. On a 20GB root fs 5% is probably not excessive, so I
wouldn't touch it, though.

I'm not sure how much space you would realistically need reserved on a
3TB fs to avoid fragmentation, but unless you know otherwise the
defaults are probably sane.

Petter

> On 11/11/2015 12:54 PM, Dave Dodge wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 11:49:04AM -0800, John R. Sowden wrote:  
> >> On 11/11/2015 11:36 AM, Sébastien wrote:  
> >>> On 11 Nov 2015 19:08, "John R. Sowden" wrote:  
> >>>> Below is a 'properties' window of my root directory.  How can I
> >>>> have 15.7 GB of a 21GB partition used, yet only have 785MB
> >>>> free?  
> >> john at sentry15:~$ df -h
> >> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> >> /dev/sda3        20G   18G  1.1G  95% /  
> > Adding those up leaves about 5% unaccounted for.  This is normal for
> > ext4, especially for "/".  When the filesystem is created it
> > reserves 5% of the space for root processes, so that non-root
> > processes can't completely fill the filesystem and prevent repair
> > tools or log daemons from running.
> >
> >                                -Dave Dodge/dododge at dododge.net
> >  
> 
> 



-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."