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I got an alert on my desktop saying that my home directory had only 1.8 GB remaining, which seemed odd to me because I thought I had a lot more than that. I keep my /home directory on a separate partition with roughly 300GB, and I didn't think I had used that much.

There was a button to open the Disk Usage Analyzer, and this was what was displayed:

Disk Usage Analyzer

Two things confuse me.

  1. It says I have 286.6 GB total space, of which only 60.8 GB is used, leaving 225.9 GB available. That being the case, why does it say 100% usage in the list of directories?

  2. Storage is on a separate partition, with a symlinked directory in my home folder. Why is it being included in the total? (It isn't more than 1/3 full in any case).

If I run Disk Usage Analyzer as root, which was suggested to me as being potentially more informative, I actually get a display that has less information and just as confusing:

Root Disk Usage Analyzer

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  • You have to run it as root, which is explained in this duplicate question. Jul 22, 2013 at 9:57
  • @TomBrossman: Running the Disk Usage Analyzer as root does not lead to any more revealing information. In fact, it is even more terse and unrevealing than running it as a regular user. I've attached a screenshot to my question.
    – Questioner
    Jul 23, 2013 at 1:36
  • That's strange. I don't think I ever got meaningful results out of Disk Usage Analyzer (I'm probably using it wrong) but I've had better results with GdMap. Failing that, make sure that you've scanned the drive (it looks like the second screenshot shows the program waiting for you to tell it where to scan...). Jul 23, 2013 at 10:44

1 Answer 1

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  1. It says I have 286.6 GB total space, of which only 60.8 GB is used, leaving 225.9 GB available. That being the case, why does it say 100% usage in the list of directories?

You have obviously chosen to scan your home directory. What is shown is what folders make up the total of the home directory, and hence all the contents of the home directory will add up to 100%. As a clarification, it is shown that the home directory contains 100% of the listed directories and files.

  1. Storage is on a separate partition, with a symlinked directory in my home folder. Why is it being included in the total? (It isn't more than 1/3 full in any case).

This might indeed make it a bit hard to interpret the figures. What I do know is that the program will follow symlinks. As to my knowledge, this can't be disabled.

I am not sure from where the program will get the "Total filesystem capacity" data at the top when several filesystems are in play on the scanned path through symlinks.

For a clearer view on the file system capacity (capacities), it might be more useful to use the df terminal command. Run with an option, df -hto get human readable file sizes. The command will list the physical drives and the mount points, e.g.:

$ df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5                158G   51G   99G  34% /
none                     4,0K     0  4,0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                     1,9G  4,0K  1,9G   1% /dev
tmpfs                    386M  1,2M  385M   1% /run
none                     5,0M     0  5,0M   0% /run/lock
none                     1,9G  1,5M  1,9G   1% /run/shm
none                     100M   60K  100M   1% /run/user
deskt:/media/Samsung     801G  414G  388G  52% /mnt/deskt/data
deskt:/home/carl         113G   40G   68G  37% /mnt/deskt/carl
deskt:/tmp               113G   40G   68G  37% /mnt/deskt/tmp
/dev/sda3                 63G   26G   37G  42% /media/carl/OS

The /dev/sda? entries will show the capacity and usage of the different partitions.

On a side note, a more natural approach of having the home folder on a separate partition would be to mount /home/ to that partition, rather than doing it with a symlink.

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  • I agree with the answer that was deleted. That a program called "Disk Usage Analyzer" is giving me results based on a particular directory's contents is counter intuitive.
    – Questioner
    May 28, 2014 at 11:44

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