Command-Line – How to Get Disk Usage

You can mount the drive from command line easily even without creating a folder in /media as other question suggests.

• Open a terminal
• Type udisks --mount /dev/sda2

The result?

Your /dev/sda2 will be mounted in the /media/label, where label refers to the name of label of the partition. For example, my /dev/sda2 is labeled as Main, and when i do the command, "/dev/sda2" will be mounted on /media/Main.

How do i know, My Drive "Drivename"'s sdaX number ?

• You can execute sudo blkid command in a terminal to know, which sdaX you have to input.

  Example: My example run returns this:

anwar@edubuntu-lenovo:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="01CD4993623F05D0" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda2: LABEL="Main" UUID="A80C1BD70C1B9F7E" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda3: LABEL="Work" UUID="01CCB271A80A07E0" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda5: LABEL="Free" UUID="DE53-CB6B" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sda6: UUID="364126ac-01c9-4dd2-ab19-eecc733a9640" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda7: UUID="b1537dfc-e918-4fea-9a99-44a034e57429" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sda8: UUID="01CD49906DD38770" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda9: LABEL="Precise-New" UUID="7c934266-dfcb-45de-879b-e3ceafcd0862" TYPE="ext4"

So i know that, if I wanted to mount "Work", I have to use sda3.

If the partition has no label:

If your partition has no label, it will be mounted in /media/UUID, where UUID refers to the UUID of the partition.
For example: If i mount my /dev/sda8, which does not have a Label, it will be mounted in /media/01CD49906DD38770 Folder.

Hope this will help.

baobab: If you want to use baobab, this is possible by mounting the root filesystem in another place and analysing that. This way, other filesystems will not be mounted in the new root mount and any files hidden by mounts under / will be uncovered and counted in your analysis.

Assuming your root filesystem is on sda1 (df will tell you which device it is):

mkdir root-rebound
sudo mount /dev/sda1 root-rebound
baobab root-rebound

and then tidy up when you're done:

sudo umount root-rebound
rmdir root-rebound

Alternatively you could unmount said file systems manually. You can also scan just your home folder, because it will most likely contain the source of the excessive disk space usage.

du has two options which are able to prevent counting other filesystems:

 -x, --one-file-system
         skip directories on different file systems
     --exclude=PATTERN
         exclude files that match PATTERN

Thus,

du -hx

would ignore all other mounted filesystems or

du -h --exclude /media

would ignore all files in /media where most filesystems are mounted.

If you're using du, sorting so that the biggest things appear at the bottom of the list can help decipher the output. eg:

du -hx | sort -h