Ubuntu server slowly filling up

Question

We had our Samba server (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) share fill up the other day, but when I went to look at it I could't see any of the shares have too much on them.

We have 5 group shares and then each user has an individual share.

One user has 22 GB of stuff. A few others have 10-20 MB of stuff and everyone else's are empty.

So maybe like 26 GB total.

I deleted a few files yesterday and freed up about 250 MB of space. Today when I checked it it was completely full again and I deleted some older files and freed up about 170 MB of stuff, but I can watch it slowly creep down in free space.

I keep running a df -h

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            241690180 229340500    169200 100% /
varrun                  257632       260    257372   1% /var/run
varlock                 257632         0    257632   0% /var/lock
udev                    257632        72    257560   1% /dev
devshm                  257632        52    257580   1% /dev/shm
lrm                     257632     40000    217632  16% /lib/modules/2.6.24-28-generic

What can I do to try to hunt down what's taking up so much of my HDD? (I'm fairly new to Unix in general so I apologize if this is not well explained.)

After running a sudo du -sch * I got the following.

root@MON-PDC:/# sudo du -sch *
5.2M    bin
106M    boot
0       cdrom
136K    dev
16M     etc
du: cannot access `home/administrator/.gvfs': Permission denied
216G    home
4.0K    initrd
0       initrd.img
0       initrd.img.old
767M    lib
16K     lost+found
12K     media
4.0K    mnt
4.0K    opt
du: cannot access `proc/7311/task/7311/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/7311/task/7311/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/7311/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/7311/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
0       proc
436K    root
6.8M    sbin
4.0K    srv
0       sys
100K    tmp
2.0G    usr
492M    var
0       vmlinuz
0       vmlinuz.old
219G    total

I noticed that Home is taking up 216 GB.

So I checked that out the home directory and there is a user that shows as 209 GB of data.

But when I run the du -sch * command from under his dir I get only 23 GB of data.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

You could repeatedly use the du command to find out the directory that's filling up.

cd /
du -sch *

Then cd to the suspected directory and do another du -sch *

Keep repeating until you find the culprit.

Answer 2

Try

sudo du -h /home

you can limit the depth of displayed directories by appending the option --max-depth=n where n is the desired depth.

The command you tried used * to select the files to analyze. Files beginning with a dot (.) won't be selected. If you call du on a directory it will recurse in to all subdirectories, even the hidden ones (with a dot).

Answer 3

If you want a visual way of viewing the size of everything as it stands now, you could try filelight, which is a free disk-space analyzer, that has a pretty slick visual way of displaying the data and digging into it.

Answer 4

It turned out there was a .recycler folder in each of the Samba user directories.

I didn't see them with a ls but I can see them with a ls -a.