The situation: df (which shows disk usage) disagrees with du (which shows disk space taken up by files). So you have disk space which is "used", but it is not taken up by any files!? What gives!?
For example:
root@xps:~# df -h /tmp
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted …When investigating disk usage issues on a very full disk, the investigation may actually be hampered by the lack of disk space. For example:
du -x -m / | sort -nr | head -25
can fail if you have a lot of directories and your disk is completely full: sort will only process …
Sometimes your disk usage does not add up - for example:
karl@someserver:~$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 52G 49G 243M 100% /
So what gives? 49Gb + 248Mb is definitely less than 52Gb !! This is a sizeable discrepancy of at least 1.5 …
Let us assume you already figured out where your disk space went.
Cleaning up disk space is easy: You just delete stuf, right?
Well.. Mostly. There are a couple of things to watch out for:
Imagine the scenario: Your application does not work, and no errors are appearing in your log files. In fact: nothing new is appearing in your log files! Bah!
And then you discover that your root file system is full. And that's the only file system on the box:
Filesystem 1K-blocks …