elementary OS 5.1 Hera
Issue in a Nutshell: The disk space for elementary OS seems to have recently ballooned significantly. I have elementary OS on a ~105GB partition. Recently, I saw the Files app reported that the File System was using a staggering 86.1GB.
What I Tried Manually going through the folders from root to try to identify where the sudden disk usage was. Then I tried:
cd /
sudo du -h --max-depth=1 --exclude=media --exclude=run --exclude=proc
The dh report shows:
16M ./bin
1.5G ./var
4.7G ./usr
4.0K ./srv
16K ./lost+found
24M ./onedrive
709M ./snap
11G ./home
272K ./opt
4.0K ./lib64
170M ./boot
0 ./dev
4.0K ./cdrom
0 ./sys
977M ./lib
5.8M ./lib32
17M ./sbin
604K ./root
4.0K ./mnt
20M ./etc
132K ./tmp
21G .
I am puzzled by the reported 21GB in root. I see no files in root (ls -la
) anywhere near that size (there is a unused 2GB swapfile).
Questions
- What does the 21GB mean in the dh report?
- Why would there be a mysterious 21GB chunk?
- Is there a standard reason why elementary OS would be ballooning like this? I am almost out of space.
- The home directory at 11GB seems to be primarily in the
/home/me/.local
directory. I use very very very little actual space in /home for documents etc. (Most of the data is stored on a separate server partition.)
I installed elementary OS 5.1 Hera about three months ago and use it normally (plain vanilla install). I minimize apps installed to core apps.
Disk Usage Analyzer
from the AppCenter when looking for balooning files. It has a really nice and easy to use interface. Maybe it can help you find the problem?