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Re: [tlug] Disappearing Disk Space



GENERAL UPDATE:

On 12/30/2015 02:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
  > Is there a way to show and list all recent write activity and file
  > size change?

If you use a journaling file system, there are debug utilities that
can summarize the journal for you.  Also, journals by their very
nature create "duplicate" content.  I'm not sure how that gets
resolved by stat.

I also like the "sparse storage for VM disks" hypothesis Jens suggested.

A brief update to report that I may have solved the problem, comment on some strange things, and to say I figured a bunch of stuff out on my own.
About a week ago, my 9Gb root partition, which usually has 1.5~2 Gb 
free, suddenly filled up to bursting, allowing no additional input 
anywhere.  I ran parted from a USB disk and attempted to add 2Gb to the 
root partition by shrinking my main partition and moving my swap file so 
that I could expand root.
Didn't work.  For some reason trying to shrink my main partition caused 
parted to freeze.
So, I shrunk my swap file and expanded my root partition by 2Gb and when 
I logged back in, got a pile of error messages.  I had to manually log 
into my desktop using startx and, when I ran my file manager in root 
mode, discovered four files with 128-character names that took up a 
little over 2Gb in the root partition.  I erased them.  Got a "files 
available for upgrade" message, so I ran the upgrade and rebooted, only 
to find that Claws Mail, LibreOffice, Iceweasel, and Skype all refused 
to start.
So, I plugged the USB disk back in and resized everything back to its 
initial values.  I then followed the suggested steps to run fsck in 
manual mode -- which involves typing in "fsck /dev/sda(x)" and holding 
down the "Y" key for 30 minutes while sectors get fixed, one-by-one.  A 
tablet with your current reading materials on it is a good thing to have 
close at hand.
After rebooting, I received messages that Claws Mail, Iceweasel, and 
LibreOffice all had upgrades available, which fixed all of their 
problems.  Skype took some creative rerouting of the libGL.so.1 file 
(HINT: the first seven suggested online fixes don't work for anything 
other than Ubuntu 12~14).  And VirtualBox upgraded.  The upgrade borked 
a bunch of stuff that needed fixing, most of the problem caused by the 
MS installation verification police, but that's another story.
But, what I wanted to report was that, suddenly, about 240Gb of empty 
space suddenly appeared on my HDD and everything seems to run faster.
--
CL


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