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I have had the pi running for only a week or so. Hardened it up a bit, installed nextcloud (storing it's data on an external USB HDD) and noticed yesterday that the SD card is full.

I uninstalled a load of stuff to free up some space and it's filling up again!

Please help me work out why/what is filling it up and help me stop it :-)

Here are some details: My Pi Specification Model: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B V1.2 2015 SD Card: 16GB with NOOBS so 14GB partition for the OS OS: Raspbrian Jessie

My biggest question is why the discrepancy between df saying I've used nearly al the 14GB and ncdu saying I've only got 3.7GB of files. Here are some screenshots that might illuminate things:

df -h showing 12/14GB used in /dev/root

ncdu showing 3.7GB of files from the root

Ah - can't do more than 2 links. I'll see if I can do the next one by text:

Prompt: sudo find . -printf '\''%s %p\n'\''| sort -nr | grep -v ./media | head -10
find: `./proc/3155/task/3155/fd/5': No such file or directory
find: `./proc/3155/task/3155/fdinfo/5': No such file or directory
find: `./proc/3155/fd/5': No such file or directory
find: `./proc/3155/fdinfo/5': No such file or directory
596770750 ./home/pidavid/hugemovie.mov
172482560 ./usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser
104857600 ./var/swap
61661823 ./var/lib/apt/lists/mirrordirector.raspbian.org_raspbian_dists_stretch_main_binary-armhf_Packages
51759412 ./usr/lib/electron/electron
50122807 ./var/lib/apt/lists/mirrordirector.raspbian.org_raspbian_dists_jessie_main_binary-armhf_Packages
44040192 ./var/lib/mysql/ibdata1
40582964 ./usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libLLVM-3.9.so.1
40208080 ./var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
40187546 ./var/cache/apt/srcpkgcache.bin

This shows the swap file being the biggest at 100MB.

I'm at a loss at the moment. I hope you can help.

Thanks

David

3 Answers 3

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Are you emptying your trash? If you are putting stuff into the trash bin, but not emptying it, the files are still taking up space.

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  • I think I worked out that my external drive wasn't mounted - so all the data that I thought was going there was, in fact, staying on my SD Card. Is there an obvious way to see if a mount point is in fact mounted when you cd in to it?
    – David J
    Aug 14, 2017 at 21:21
  • @DavidJ, do df -h . That will print information about the filesystem you are currently in. If you think you're on a mounted drive, but it prints information about /dev/root mounted on /, then you need to figure out what happened to it.
    – BowlOfRed
    Aug 15, 2017 at 2:42
  • You can also use the mount -l command to list the currently mounted partitions or have a look in the /proc/mounts file. Dec 17, 2018 at 8:56
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First lets see if the data is still named in the filesystem. What do you get when you run sudo du -xsh /? This will give the size of the data that can be seen walking the root filesystem. If this is significantly less than the 12G that df reports, then it could be due to removed files.

If so, you might try running this from the shell: sudo perl -MFile::Find -e 'sub wanted {if (-l $_) {$t = readlink "$File::Find::name"; if ($File::Find::name =~ m!/fd/! and $t =~ /\(deleted\)$/) {@file = stat($File::Find::name); if ($file[3] == 0 and $file[12] > 0) {print "$file[12] - $t\n"}}}} find(\&wanted, "/proc/");'

This will look for file descriptors in /proc that point to deleted files. If those files have no remaining links and size is greater than zero, it will print the number of blocks and the former name of the file. If you see several large files there, show the output. As an example on my machine, it found a test file that I deleted while open:

$ sudo perl  -MFile::Find -e 'sub wanted {if (-l $_) {$t = readlink "$File::Find::name"; if ($File::Find::name =~ m!/fd/! and $t =~ /\(deleted\)$/) {@file = stat($File::Find::name); if ($file[3] == 0 and $file[12] > 0) {print "$file[12] - $t\n"}}}} find(\&wanted, "/proc/");'
8 - /tmp/foobar (deleted)
8 - /tmp/foobar (deleted)
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  • Wow - that all looks very complicated to me! I ran it and it gave exactly NO output - I guess that's good. Thanks!
    – David J
    Aug 14, 2017 at 21:19
  • What was the size reported by sudo du -xsh /?
    – BowlOfRed
    Aug 15, 2017 at 0:18
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You may also wanna run apt clean to remove downloaded packages during updates.

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