Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 Low Disk Space

Before you try something new, do some research and then a little more, then if you really need something that badly try it out.

I did some reading on backing up my system as anyone who knows how delicate hard drives are strongly advises you should do this. I do keep CD’s backed up with all my digital images and documents but since the book I was reading recommended using the system to do a backup I thought I’d try it. I did the following: System>Administration>Simple Backup config.

From there I clicked on backup, not sure exactly what it would do, but since it was backing up my installation I thought it could only be good. After I clicked on ‘backup now’ I went back to work on another window and left the backup application running. It took about 10 minutes to complete the backup. My current system setup is a Windows partition of 15G and 20G for Ubuntu, 2G for the swap drive. I store about 7G of photos on my Ubuntu partition so that leaves me with about 10G of free space.

A few days after the backup I was doing some routine cleanups on my system when I checked my disk usage and found I had almost reached the full capacity of my 20G partition. Sigh, this was not possible. Just when I thought things were running well, another obstacle in the way. As usual, the first place to check was the Ubuntu forums, where I found my problem is relatively common. I eventually located the location of the file responsible for taking up around 8G of space. It was a backup file and located in a folder I could not access from the desktop. The commands were as follows:

Applications>Accessories>Terminal, sudo aptitude clean (cleans out archives)

sudo du -sh /* (shows file space usage by application)

My disk eater was 8.2G /var, I needed more information so I typed in sudo du -h /var and got this:

7.9G /var/backup/2007-01-22_22.11.51.797882.michael-laptop.ful (the disk eater)

To remove it I typed in the following (still in the terminal):

sudo rm -r /var/backup/2007-01-22_22.11.51.797882.michael-laptop.ful

That erased the problem, and now I’m back with 10G of additional space on my drive.

This was an unexpected problem but one that took me about 3 hours to solve, not the best way to spend a morning, but I figured Ubuntu is a learning curve so I’ll leave it at that, but I do advise anyone wanting to try backing up their systems to check very carefully before they do it.

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• The First Step
• Up and Running
• Switching to Ubuntu – 6 Month Review
• Rsync Backups For External Disks