Hi,

I've tried the obvious with this problem and have hit a brick wall.

I have a xen host server, with a separate 2TB physical disk, volume group and logical volume set aside for my backup server. This disk is mounted in a guest OS (debian squeeze 6.0.2) as /data. No LVM is in place in the guest OS, just at the host level so nested LVM isn't an issue.

The disk is 98% full so we did some housekeeping of old backup files (not in use) but the disk space wouldn't come down. So far the following has been tried

* fsck - all OK
* sync - no effect
* reboot - no effect
* unmapping the disk on the Xen host and adding it back in
* fsck'ing the disk on the xen host

Even after all this, plus several reboots, any files I am removing after trying fixes won't bring down the disk space. It appears to be almost stuck.

Are you sure you removed files from "that" disk?
This isn't something silly like you need to empty trash, right?

Point here is "removing files from a disk, frees up space." Although if you remove a 1K file on a 2T disk, that's not too much extra space.

When you use df, check and recheck your used and available blocks before and after your cleanup. There is also a chance that whatever you cleaned up were symbolic links pointing to somewhere else on the system.

Positive, it only has (other than its much smaller root disk) one disk attached and mounted as /data. Its our backup server running without a GUI, it isn't configured to have a trash can and we don't use symlinks.

I removed 300GB initially and have been moving 2GB+ files since to test it after trying fixes.

I managed to make some room by running tune2fs and blatting the reserved block count to 0, its a data disk so we don't really need this, and certainly not 100GB's worth.

This did make a difference, and it dropped from 98% to 93%. After removing an 8GB+ sized file, the df -k output shows changes, but only to the Available column, nothing else. The df -h output doesn't show any changes at all, which is weirdness.

Remember that a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes; therefore one percent of 2TB = 20 GB; removing an 8 GB file will show extra space in the summary but will only affect the percentage available value when enough has been freed to make the end result reach the next 1% increment of measure.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you. I'm going to write a cheap and dirty script to look for big/old files and run it over the weekend, then start culling old data in droves on Monday, so hopefully that should help.

If you write that script would you mind posting it, I have tried and failed to do the same.