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When installing Ubuntu 12.10 for the first time, I made sure /home had it's own partition, gave it about 185GB, and gave root ~10GB. Now root is almost full after a few days and I've noticed that root is as big as /home and some additional MB from some actual root files. Note that I deleted some unused files in /home to make sure it really affects how much space is used in root, and it clearly does. (checked in gparted) I've also made sure the files I am talking about are actually in /home/myname/ and not just in root's home.

df -h spits out this information:

df: `/root/.gvfs': Permission denied
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sdb2       9.2G  7.9G  908M  90% /
udev            3.9G   12K  3.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           1.6G  932K  1.6G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            3.9G  6.4M  3.9G   1% /run/shm
none            100M  112K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sdb3       184G  4.9G  170G   3% /home
/dev/sdb4       729G   87G  642G  12% /media/mave/Storage

I cut out my windows partitions as I don't see any relevance.

I hope this is enough information for someone to tell me what I did wrong

Here another call of df -h after deleting some more files:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2       9.2G  7.7G  1.1G  88% /
udev            3.9G   12K  3.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           1.6G  932K  1.6G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            3.9G  6.2M  3.9G   1% /run/shm
none            100M  100K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sdb3       184G  4.9G  170G   3% /home
/dev/sdb4       729G   87G  642G  12% /media/mave/Storage
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  • Can you give the output of this command? sudo du -sh /*; sudo du -sh /root/* Oct 28, 2012 at 22:47
  • Or if you could post the results of your df -h test before and after deleting files under ~/ as you describe?
    – Tim Booth
    Oct 28, 2012 at 23:14
  • @medigeek 8.9M /bin 29M /boot 4.0K /cdrom 12K /dev 14M /etc 4.7G /home 0 /initrd.img 0 /initrd.img.old 223M /lib 3.4M /lib32 4.0K /lib64 16K /lost+found
    – Void
    Oct 28, 2012 at 23:28
  • @TimBooth edited the main question.
    – Void
    Oct 28, 2012 at 23:33
  • df -h ~/ ? (To see the info about the partition your home directory is actually on.) Oct 28, 2012 at 23:39

2 Answers 2

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Your root partition is probably filling up with the package cache from system updates. Run sudo apt-get clean to remove package files which where already installed. Apt normally keeps package files after downloading, even though they are already unzipped and installed and have nothing to do with the function of the software anymore.

Apart from that 10 Gig are a little cozy for a contemporary Ubuntu.

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  • I've already done that after seeing this being suggested in some forums but it only cleared a few MB, which wasn't so surprising considering the fact I have only just started using Ubuntu. And I've also tried resizing partitions, which was also very problematic. Doesn't belong here right now, though.
    – Void
    Oct 28, 2012 at 23:41
0

Based on the output in your question, I see a change in /dev/sdb2 but not a change in /dev/sdb3. This leads me to believe that the files you deleted were on /dev/sdb2. If they were in fact under ~/ then that means, transitively, that ~/ is on /dev/sdb2. We can confirm or deny this by running the following:

sudo mount
/dev/root on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=18812k,mode=755)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=37624k)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw,relatime,size=10240k,mode=755)
tmpfs on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=37624k)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

And you will be looking for a line that looks like

/dev/sdb3 on /home type ext3 (rw,nosuid,relatime,errors=remount-ro)

If you don't see a line like that try to run this:

ls -l /home ## Do not put a trailing slash here (i.e., not "/home/" )

If you see something like...

lrwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi 9 Oct 28 19:48 ./link -> ./some/other/path

... then /home is still on your root partition.

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  • I can see the line /dev/sdb3 on /home type ext4 (rw)
    – Void
    Oct 28, 2012 at 23:59
  • Hmm, try to ls -l /home/* and see if anything there symlinks back to /dev/sdb2. If not then it is merely a coincidence that /dev/sdb2 changed in size before.
    – Huckle
    Oct 29, 2012 at 0:28
  • No symlinks here. pastebin.com/UYfh8DTp I still wonder how my root is so large though. I guess I'll look into wine tomorrow, maybe it really is just that.
    – Void
    Oct 29, 2012 at 0:35
  • du is more useful for finding out which folders contain more information. du -s -h ./* will summarize each folder and file in the current directory.
    – Huckle
    Oct 29, 2012 at 0:37

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