determining the space used in / partition

[Zbigniew Szalbot]

2007/10/2, Duane Hill <d.hill at yournetplus.com>:
> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 at 07:23 +0200, zszalbot at gmail.com confabulated:
>
> > Hello again,
> >
> >>> Through df I realized my / partiotion is out of space:
> >>> Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> >>> /dev/ad0s1a    198126   196070   -13794   108%    /
> >>> devfs               1        1        0   100%    /dev
> >>> /dev/ad0s1e  44511308  4217762 36732642    10%    /usr
> >>> /dev/ad0s1d  30462636  3210580 24815046    11%    /var
> >>> devfs               1        1        0   100%    /var/named/dev
> >>> /dev/da0s1c  75685352 34308200 35322324    49%    /mnt/usbck
> >>>
> >>> How can I determine what occupies the space in it? That is, it is not
> >>> big as you can see. So I issued:
> >>> du -hs /
> >>> but it was taking ages (I am not sure but maybe du -hs counts all
> >>> directories on the HD?
> >>>
> >>> Anyway, I do not really know where to look what has eaten the / space.
> >>> Were it for /usr or /var,  it would be obvious to me where to look for
> >>> information.
> >>>
> >>> Many thanks!
> >>
> >> I don't see you have defined a /tmp partition. Perhaps /tmp is taking up
> >> all the space. Try:
> >>
> >>    du -h /tmp
> >>
> >> and see how much /tmp is taking up.
> > du -hs /tmp
> > 1.4M    /tmp
> >
> > du -hs /
> > 40GB
> >
> > One thing that comes to my mind. Each Sunday I have a script which
> > makes a full dump of the HD to a back-up USB drive. Last weekend
> > someone cleaining the computer room, must have accidentally powered
> > off the USB drive. As a result, the dump has not been completed
> > because the USB drive was not mounted at that time. I use cron for
> > this task. Does it matter could have caused this?
>
> If the '-L' switch is used (telling dump it is dumping a live file system)
> it will first dump everything into a .snap directory before performing the
> dump. What does:
>
>    du -hs /.snap
>
> give for a result?
Thank you Duane! Yes, I do use the L switch.
Unfortunately,
du -hs /.snap
2.0K    /.snap

Hah - mystery cleared!
I know what happened but you put me on the right track.

For the record. During the backup, the file system is dumped to a dir
on a USB drive called backup. Now, since the drive was unavailable,
the dump utility created /backup dir and populated it with
lists-var-l0-2007-09-30.dump.bz2 (dumping var) but of course it died
as there was not enough space on the / to do it. I mean this is what I
make of this.

So after deleting /backup I get:
df
Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a    198126    74084   108192    41%    /
devfs               1        1        0   100%    /dev
/dev/ad0s1e  44511308  4217760 36732644    10%    /usr
/dev/ad0s1d  30462636  3210650 24814976    11%    /var
devfs               1        1        0   100%    /var/named/dev
/dev/da0s1c  75685352 34308200 35322324    49%    /mnt/usbck

Thanks!

zbigniew szalbot