Different used disk space with du and quota.

kanyakumarirock · 01-23-2024, 07:56 AM

Dear members

From my /work directory by going into it, when I type

Quote:

du -cbsh

the total disk storage occupancy is 145 GB.

However, from my general folder, when I type

Quote:

quota -s

to get the folder occupancy, it shows around 1000G.

Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/dev/mapper/vgdata-work
1040G* 500G 800G 25days 159k 10000k 50000k
/dev/mapper/vgdata-home
37061M 51200M 100G 196k 1000k 5000k

It is really surprising and I am unable to solve the mystery. My actual file storage occupancy is 144G while the search for quota shows the files are occupying 1000G of storage space. How can I ascertaim the hidden files or the reasons behind this discrepancy?

Please suggest how to rectify this issue?

thanks

mrmazda · 01-23-2024, 02:32 PM

OP's off-site thread hasn't seemed to help, hence, his tries here. I don't know anything about using quotas. I wouldn't know the optimal location to ask either. @michaelk the locked Server thread or General IMO would have been better than moderator limiting only to Debian.

Petri Kaukasoina · 01-23-2024, 03:29 PM

Quote:

my /work filesystem had reached the limit of 1000G of memory in use. I then started to delete a number of large files and got the number down to about 800G but over time, it kept increasing again at a rate of about a gigabyte per minute so now it has reached 1000G again.

One possibility:

If a process has opened a file to write and you have deleted the file, it only gets removed from the directory but it still exists until the process closes the file. For example a large growing log file keeps growing but you can't see it using du because there is no directory entry.

Try this to see the deleted files still open:

Code:

sudo ls -l /proc/*/fd|grep '(deleted)'|grep -v -e /memfd: -e /dev/pts -e /dev/shm