/home partition taking space from / partition

rpcutts · 03-02-2009, 01:56 PM

Running Ubuntu 8.10

After getting a disk space error I checked system monitor and it shows my / partition as being 100% full and my /home partition on 35%.

http://www.23hq.com/rpcutts/photo/3999728/original

So I ran the Disk Usage Analyser to see where the main usage was. This shows that 95% of the usage on the / partition is taken up by /home.

http://www.23hq.com/rpcutts/photo/3999729/original

This seems odd as /home is on it's own partition with 130Gig available. Has anyone seen this behaviour before or know a way to rectify the problem.

Code:

sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd0e4b742

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       10199    81923436   83  Linux
/dev/sda2           38253       38913     5309482+   5  Extended
/dev/sda3           10200       38252   225335722+  83  Linux
/dev/sda5           38253       38913     5309451   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Code:

sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="e4a9d4bb-973a-44ae-b5bb-f5b6c6a238b9" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="b17e15b9-5441-4859-9e29-118a37543c4f" 
/dev/sda3: LABEL="home" UUID="222f28ce-1bb0-46dc-bfc2-ea41e35edc28" TYPE="ext3"

Code:

cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda1
UUID=e4a9d4bb-973a-44ae-b5bb-f5b6c6a238b9 /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=b17e15b9-5441-4859-9e29-118a37543c4f none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/sda3 	/home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

Code:

df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              77G   75G     0 100% /
tmpfs                 886M     0  886M   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                886M  100K  886M   1% /var/run
varlock               886M     0  886M   0% /var/lock
udev                  886M  2.8M  883M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 886M  328K  885M   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   886M  2.0M  884M   1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-12-generic/volatile
/dev/sda3             212G   73G  129G  36% /home
overflow              1.0M   36K  988K   4% /tmp

pixellany · 03-03-2009, 07:44 AM

You might try booting from live CD, mounting the two partitions, and looking their contents that way. One thing that would cause what you are seeing is if /home on sda1 was full before mounting sda3 at /home. Did you, for example, recently create the separate partition for /home?

syg00 · 03-03-2009, 08:00 AM

What does "cat /proc/mounts" show ?.

rpcutts · 03-04-2009, 05:09 AM

SOLVED

I wasn't as first appeared.
The /home partition had nothing to do with it, it just appeared that way.

The problem was using "Simple Backup Suite" with an external HDD. It was schedules to backup /home to the HDD once a week. I figured that if the drive was unplugged it would just fail.

Instead it does the backup and places it in a folder /media/backup that can only be accessed by root. It seems the Disk Usage Analyser could not scan this folder so I couldn't tell that is what was taking up 70Gig.