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Martin Drozdik
Asked: 2017-12-20 10:38:33 +0800 CST

How to diagnose missing disk space? (disk usage analyzer not corresponding to df)

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I have a very mysterious problem. Today, I was not able to log in. There was no "incorrect-password" message or anything, just the symptoms described in this question.

So I logged into the GUI-less shell and the first thing that shocked me was that when I hit tab, the bash auto-completion failed, because there was not enough space to create a temporary file. I was shocked, since I expected that about 90% of disk is still free. After removing some redundant docker volumes I was able to login and now I am trying to see where all my disk space went:

enter image description here

It seems that I have about 5 Giga of stuff in my home folder and another 5 is used by the system. This seems to correspond to reality. Since my disk is about 100 Giga I have nothing to worry about. However, df thinks otherwise:

Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                         3,9G     0  3,9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                        788M  9,9M  778M   2% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root  102G   96G  847M 100% /
tmpfs                        3,9G   57M  3,8G   2% /dev/shm
tmpfs                        5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                        3,9G     0  3,9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1                    464M  121M  315M  28% /boot
tmpfs                        788M  172K  788M   1% /run/user/1000
/home/askbe4/.Private        102G   96G  847M 100% /home/askbe4

Or more visually:

enter image description here

That is, the other tools show that I have only about 800 Megabytes free. This is a drastic difference. Also, it stands to mention that the disk and the home folder are both encrypted. I encrypted them just by clicking 'yes' during Ubuntu installation.

I feel completely dumbfounded and have no Idea what to make of this. Any hints are most welcome.

partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    From this guide on recovering lost disk space:

    Permissions. Users of Ubuntu are allowed access to files as set by permissions. These file permissions may prevent a user from seeing files created or stored in system folders and those owned by other users. If using a graphical file browser don't forget to enable hidden file viewing (usually CTRL+H). Run the commands/applications as 'root'. For command line operations, precede the command with sudo. For graphical applications such as nautilus and baobab/Disk Usage Analyzer start the command to launch the application with gksudo.

    So I ran the disk usage analyzer with:

    sudo baobab

    and suddenly it showed 90 Giga of data in /var/lib/docker. This was a docker container that ran astray and that I forgot to delete.

    Apparently I misunderstood a fundamental principle of Linux. I always thought that you can see the size of a file even when you do not have read permissions. I even tested this with sudo touch file-with-no-access. I could see the size with ls -l file-with-no-access. The thing I did not realize was that things are different when there is a directory to which I have no access.

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