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Re: [LUG] Mint 15 falsely claims / is full

 

On 09/12/13 15:07, Martijn Grooten wrote:
On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, Julian Hall wrote:
Got it!

Many thanks for all the help guys!

There was a 4.9Gb tar of a system backup that had gone onto the /media/HERA folder instead of onto media/julian/HERA which is my NAS as it was supposed to. I'm going to blame user error for that one.. evidently in my newbieness I set the destination wrongly in the backup application.

So Mint wasn't wrong, I was.. predictably. What confused me was Mint's GUI Disk Usage Analyser which seemed to be claiming the problem was with Gandalf - I really need to sort these drive names out! - which is an entirely different partition :)

Glad you found what was the issue!

I'm not sure what program you used to generate diskspaceanalyser.jpg but it does seem to show something different than what you'd expect from a program analysing used disk space (especially with du in mind).

The "100%" usage of / in the screenshot appears to show that 100% of disk usage, regardless of a partition, takes place in / or a subdirectory thereof. Which is what / does by definition.

97.7% of this takes place in /media or one of its subdirectories and 98.6% _of that_ in /media/julian.

Indeed, as /usr and /var are in the same partition, it can't be that one is 1.0% full and 0.2% full. Rather, they account for 1.0% and 0.2% respectively of the used disk space in / .

Martijn.


Hi Martijn,

What happened was the machine had been idle and locked the screen, so as usual I entered my password to resume working. Then I had a warning dialog box that / was full with two buttons 'Ignore' and 'Examine'. Ignore would obviously be stupid so I clicked Examine, and that ran Mint's own Disk Usage Analyser, which is the screenshot you're referring to.

It turns out it was right that the problem was in /media, but wrong that it was in a subdirectory of /media/julian - I think? - as /media/HERA is not a subdirectory of /media/julian.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'regardless of partition' as I thought that mounting / , /home , and all the others in separate physical partitions, the only place I would have to look for a problem if / was full would be that one partition. Is that not the case or am I getting it wrong - again?

Anyway thanks to you guys I now know to use du in a terminal if I want accurate information.

Kind regards,

Julian

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