Ubuntu – Low disk space: home/user folder occupies 94GB

11.04diskdisk-usage

I am low on disk space and when I check the Disk Usage analyzer (using gksudo baobab) it indicates that my home/teddy folder is using 94GB, but when I browse through its contents I can only account for about 1gb of that usage. I've tried sudo apt-get clean and deleting the cached package files from Synaptic Package Manager, emptied trash but that has not changed the amount of free space I have.

Disk use

It seems similar to this problem
But using the root disk usage analyzer has not given any insight into what is consuming so much space.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

If you think you have some gigantic files that disk analyzer is not seeing for some reason, you may use ls to look for large files. Try this for example: ls -alrS in your home folder.

Is this a wubi installatoin shared with win32 files? A few weeks ago I encountered a similar issue on a wubi system that was installed by a friend. As it is in your case, the disk analyzer was showing a really high value for home folder, much more than the sum of its sub-folders. I cant comment on why disk analyser was behaving in this way, but the approach I took in my case was to do a clean install of Ubuntu on a dedicated partition. Of course that is not a very good solution, but if this is a relatively new system, it might be a reasonable workaround.

Hopefully someone else can shed some light on why disk analyzer is behaving in this way, and how to make that disk space available.

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