Missing Space: Problem with Wastebin?
 

I have been using Mandriva 2006 for about 10 days now. When installed and wishing to use right-click to delete items (as in previous versions up to 2005), instead of just 'Delete' I got something like 'Wastebin & Delete'. I used this for a couple of days until I started to run out of space on my hard disk. I tried going to the Wastebin but it's empty. I've been searching through 'Configure KDE' and 'Control Centre' hoping to find a magic button to press. I've downloaded and installed all the bugfixes and updates. I did find out how to restore the right-click option to 'Delete'.

My Home directory is 25 gb, there is 14.4 data in it and 3.5 space. I'm thinking about re-installing just to get my space back, but without deleting my Home directory I am not sure whether it will work.

I have done a search here and have seen 3 queries indicating that others may be having similar problems. They were advised to go into the directory (cd wastebin, I think) then use a command line to delete data, but were warned it was a dangerous move. When I open the Wastebin by double clicking on the icon, it is empty - so is the data in a directory called wastebin although it's not in Wastebin?

Just to clarify, when I am going to backup to a dvd I will put all the items in a folder/directory and when I am finished with it, simply delete the folder (which may contain other folders). In case this makes any difference - I have been following this practice for a couple of years in older versions without problem.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Do you remember some of the file names you delete, so that you could find them with locate?

locate -u

updates the locate database

Also the -s arg for find will help you find all files over a certain size.

find / -size +1024k -print | less

will show all the files over a megabyte

I usually aim for files 20MB or more to find that hiding log file.

The best command to use when trying to track down where your space has run off to is probably du. For starters, the command:

du --max-depth=2 /home

will tell you how much space is being taken up in /home and it's subdirectories (but only to a depth of 2, i.e. if you have a folder /home/username/Music it will tell you the size, but it will NOT tell you the size of /home/username/Music/Simpson's_Christmas_Album). Once you find where most of your space is going, you can narrow down where the space is being used up by running the command again on that subdirectory. For example, if you find out that Desktop is using up 10 GB of space, you could run:

du --max-depth=1 /home/username/Desktop

to see the space usage of the immediate subdirectories in Desktop.

Thanks Jerre, the find command got me to the Mandriva dvd iso which I had previously tried to delete, so that helped considerably.

Thanks also to springshades for your response.

I will keep a note of these helpful suggestions.