QUICK GUIDE: Clearing Disk Space
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Identifying where disk space is being used
NCDU
NCDU is a command line tool that can be used to review disk usage across a filesystem.
ncdu /
Note: You can specify a directory other than /. ie if you wanted to review the contents of /var, you would format the command as follows:
ncdu /var
Find
We can also use the find command to locate files over a specified size.
find / -type f -size +300M > filelist.txt
The above command would search / (and all subdirectories) for any files over 300M in size. There are various options available for size specification:
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G-> for gibibytes
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M-> for megabytes
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K-> for kibibytes
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b-> for bytes
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Quick wins
/var/log/journal - this can be vacuumed to reduce the size:
journalctl --vacuum-size=500M
View largest directories in /
du -h --max-depth=1 / 2> /dev/null
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Disk Reserve
Most linux filesystems (depending on FS type) will have a segment reserved for special processes. The default percentage is 5.
We can use the tune2fs command for ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems.
Check disk reserve:
tune2fs -l /dev/partition
Changing disk reserve:
tune2fs -m2 /dev/partition
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