No permission to delete file, no space to have permission

Question

My computer is nearly deadlocked. I have dedicated 200gig to Ubuntu (11.10) and lately it has decided to tell me that there is 0bytes of space left. This is causing all sorts of problems. First of all:

• What is using up this 200gig??!??! I don't download movies or anything and I only recently upgraded from my years of a 40gig HDD (with far more apps) so I can't even begin to imagine what could be taking up this much space.

• I tried to run a backup program (photorec) recently that has left lots of locked files on my computer that I can read, but can't delete. I have tried to "sudo" my way into deleting things but get the error:

  Error copying '/home/[my usr]/.Xauthority' to '/tmp/libgksu-w9v5iV': No space left on device
  [usr]@[my usr]-System-Product-Name:~$ 
  

So basically I can't delete things because I don't have the space to have the permission to delete things? Is that right? I'm very confused by all of this. Also if someone has some idea of where to look for that extremely large 150gig+ of space being hogged I'd really appreciate it. My "home" directory is 15gig in size.

EDIT: I just realised one thing. I haven't used up all of my 200gig. The disk analyser thingy shows 100% but it doesn't mean 100% of space used. This does beg the question, what is full and how do I "unfull" it...?????

Answer 1

If you boot from a live cd you can do a backup because then you don't need to store the permissions on a disk. This is also better because then you don't use the disk you are trying to backup.

Also you can find large files on your system using the find command. Look here for details.

EDIT: or use

du -ma / | sort -nr | head -n 20

to quickly find the 20 largest files.

Answer 2

200 GB should definitely be well above sufficient for ubuntu itself.

If you share a partition between the system and /home, a few hundred GB size user files (e.g. movies) can easily take that space though.

The error seems to indicate that the partition where /tmp resides on, is the one with the issue.

Try to run from a terminal/shell:

df -hl

to see all your partitions and how much of them is in use. You may limit the output to only /tmp, using:

df -hl /tmp

There's a wonderful graphical tool called 'filelight' which you may use to find which directories and files are taking up too much space. You won't be able to install it if your system partition is full though. Just a tip for the future.