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I was copying 500 GB files from an external HDD to another external HDD and suddenly the local memory was running out?

When the copy was completed I rebooted and I get now a black screen. Logged in via SSH from another machine and the df -h command says :

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3,9G     0  3,9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           801M  9,5M  792M   2% /run
/dev/sda1       213G  212G     0 100% /         <-----------------------
tmpfs           4,0G     0  4,0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           4,0G     0  4,0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           801M     0  801M   0% /run/user/1000

And the du -sh command says :

du: cannot access ‘./proc/1945/task/1945/fd/4’: No such file or directory
du: cannot access ‘./proc/1945/task/1945/fdinfo/4’: No such file or directory
du: cannot access ‘./proc/1945/fd/3’: No such file or directory
du: cannot access ‘./proc/1945/fdinfo/3’: No such file or directory
212G

I don't get why the local HDD was affected by this as the file transfer involved only 2 external hard drives, caches ? temporary files ?

Obviously now I cannot delete large files as there aren`t any!

I copy the files through dolphin on Kubuntu 15.04 and maybe I should have done it via command line.

Can anyone help me with this and maybe explain me why?

Thanks

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  • How did you connect to the machines, and how did you copy them? I think some file managers cache files locally whilst copying (which uses space and probably is slower), so usually the quickest thing to do is to transfer it directly between the machines not via another computer.
    – Wilf
    Jul 5, 2015 at 11:10
  • Both HDDs were connected USB to the same machine and I copy them with dolphin (select files, copy, select the destination HD, paste). I just login now via SSH from another machine as kubuntu wont boot.
    – rf2632
    Jul 5, 2015 at 11:13
  • 1
    A system with a full disk doesn't work very well, so I'd suggest to use a live system for your repairs. Then look for large hidden directories in your home folder.
    – luckyrumo
    Jul 5, 2015 at 11:17
  • I managed to free up some space, kubuntu boots up but it freezes after few minutes....all other programs like chrome, dolphin, terminal etc continue to work fine, it freezes just the menu bar and the desktop... Any idea?
    – rf2632
    Jul 6, 2015 at 6:25

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