Ubuntu – disk space used up

diskdisk-usage

I have upgraded to 13.04 and lose disk space, …
I have a 3 TB hard disk, and had yesterday still 890 GB free, … today all is gone!

Disk Usage Analyzer does not give me a clue and says that it could not read all directories due to missing permission.
How can I start it as root, believing that this would give me all permissions.

Log files don't show me also anything useful for that matter.

Best Answer

To run a graphical application as root, you would use the commands gksu or gksudo. However, these have been removed from Ubuntu 13.04 for various reasons.

So, in order to run Disk Usage Analyzer as root, here are two methods:

Method 1

Open a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+T. Type sudo apt-get install gksu, this will install gksu and gksudo.
To run Disk Usage Analyzer as root, do the following command:

gksudo baobab

Method 2

Open a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+T. Type sudo -i. This will log you in as root in the terminal.
Run Disk Usage Analyzer by typing:

baobab

In both cases, don't close the terminal until you are done, because closing the terminal will also close Disk Usage Analyzer.

Further to your problem, you can use the command df -h to show you the sizes of your partitions and see how much space is available.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – taking up so much space on the disk, beside the filesystem

If you use Disk Analyzer as a normal user there can be some files that you can't access or see. You can try to start it with superuser privileges. Open a terminal, or press ALT+F2 and type:

gksudo baobab

Baobab is the geeky name of the Disk Analyzer if you are wondering. Maybe it can now show you where those missing megabytes are.

Ubuntu – space on disk running low error logging /var/log/cups/error.log

I had the same problem. The log files grows very quickly and after a few hours it consumes all available space in /. At this point things start going really bad. Also the cups process hogs the CPU (100% in one core - that explains the 50% you see in a dual-cure).

Deleting the file at this point doesn't seem to help immediately. I guess the file is still in use by the cups process and it won't free the disk space... but after a reboot I got some free disk space and had time do investigate /var/log/cups/error_log.

Here's what I found in the first few lines

E [16/Oct/2016:09:48:02 +0300] MFCJ625DW: File \"/usr/lib/cups/filter/brother_lpdwrapper_mfcj625dw\" has insecure permissions (0100775/uid=0/gid=0).
E [16/Oct/2016:09:48:02 +0300] MFCJ625DW: Directory \"/usr/lib/cups/filter\" has insecure permissions (040775/uid=0/gid=0).
E [16/Oct/2016:09:48:02 +0300] MFCJ625DW: File \"/usr/lib/cups/filter/brother_lpdwrapper_mfcj625dw\" has insecure permissions (0100775/uid=0/gid=0).
E [16/Oct/2016:09:48:02 +0300] MFCJ625DW: Directory \"/usr/lib/cups/filter\" has insecure permissions (040775/uid=0/gid=0).
E [16/Oct/2016:09:48:03 +0300] Directory \"/usr/lib/cups/notifier\" has insecure permissions (040775/uid=0/gid=0).
W [16/Oct/2016:09:48:03 +0300] Notifier for subscription 1879 (dbus://) went away, retrying!
E [16/Oct/2016:09:48:03 +0300] Directory \"/usr/lib/cups/notifier\" has insecure permissions (040775/uid=0/gid=0).
W [16/Oct/2016:09:48:03 +0300] Notifier for subscription 1879 (dbus://) went away, retrying!
W [16/Oct/2016:09:48:03 +0300] Notifier for subscription 1879 (dbus://) went away, retrying!

And then the last warning is repeated over and over again... over 45000 times per second! (No wonder the disk is filled after a short time)

Assuming you have a similar problem, note that the thing cups keeps complaining about is very simple to fix:

Directory \"/usr/lib/cups/notifier\" has insecure permissions (040775/uid=0/gid=0).

Once you change the permissions with sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/cups/notifier, the file should stop growing. (while you are at it, fix the other files it complains about).