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A little note before we begin, the machine was constantly active for 5 to 7 days straight, the only reason it was shut off at some point was to turn it back on immediately due to locking or unusable behavior (Not a complete freeze, as the cursor was still moveable, these happened after doing stuff like running a certain game (GTA IV) or running the command "compiz --replace).

I have a Ubuntu 14.04 machine, and something has gone fishy with it. First, Skype had a disk i/o error, I moved 40 GB of space to an external drive and rebooted to make it work fine, then today it happens again, I notice that in my home folder it reads that there are 0 bytes worth of free space, so I hit Ctrl+H to view hidden files and folders, and notice that my Cache took up a whopping 746 GB of disk space, I went in the folder and checked everything there too, the folder lxsession had around 740 GB, I opened that up to see a single folder called "Lubuntu" (Ubuntu was installed, but I also installed the "lubuntu-desktop" package), in that was a run.log with the same space, I deleted that and emptied the trash, and 5 minutes later I'm down to 10kb disk space? I rechecked, the file was gone, I freed up more disk space only for it to become used again, what should I do?

Note: I have not experienced any "Out of the blue" crashes, even after rebooting the problem persists, Also, I moved folders from "/home/me" to my external drive, and since that drive is mounted in "/exhd", I bind mounted the folders I moved as if they were still on my hard disk, the external drive seems to have no problem and uses the NTFS file system, while my internal drive has my install partition as the problem and uses the EXT4 partition.

2 Answers 2

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Not sure if you are deleting large files, but one immediate troubleshoot would be to check your trash. Ubuntu counts the trash against the disk space, i.e. it does not auto-clear but requires you to explicitly empty it before the space taken up by deleted files is made available for use.

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  • The trash can is empty, plus I was moving my files from my drive to an external drive, however, the first file with 740 GB I deleted and then I emptied the trash, it freed up the 740 GB but that soon ran out in about 5 minutes of me being idle from heavy disk use on the computer (I wasn't technically idle altogether, I was on Firefox until I checked my home folder and noticed that the 740 GB I freed from my drive has came back.)
    – user245115
    Dec 2, 2014 at 22:20
  • Also, the .cache folder took up about 2 GB after deleting the file, even when the 740 GB came back, it seemed to happen in another location?
    – user245115
    Dec 2, 2014 at 22:25
  • Try using a disk usage visualizer like filelight to figure out where the problem is.
    – Michael
    Dec 2, 2014 at 22:38
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Apparantly, after a final reboot, the disk space went up to 736.5 GB (The File Manager says GiB, using PCManFM), I might have a bad partition, or need a new hard drive, but I'm getting a shiny new 6TB HDD for Christmas, I should backup everything to transfer there...

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