HELP! - disk usage on partition is running low

[alexismya2]

Hello. I use direct admin and when I do a back up of my website it is under 2 GB. I have 80 GB on my server. Direct Admin just sent me a message saying that The disk usage for one or more of your partitions are running low. How can this be? What could be wrong and how can I correct it?

[Rich-Boy]

What is your OS? If it's some unix variant please post the output of df

[alexismya2]

sorry, don't understand. The hosting company said I need to get into SSH to delete the transistion or dump log files, could be what is using up space. Does anyone know how to do this?

[Rich-Boy]

Log into your server via ssh and post the output of these two commands (you may need to be root, or use sudo)

# uname -a
# df -h

[alexismya2]

okay i did it. What info do you need?

[Rich-Boy]

All of it please. You can mask any info that might uniquely identify your server such as hostnames and IPs

[alexismya2]

uname is Linux

File system
/dev/sda2 size 72G Used 67G Avail 1.3 G Use 99% Mounted on /

/dev/sda1 size 487M Used 18M Avail 444M Use 4% Mounted on /boot


/dev/shm size 506M Used 0 Avail 506M Use 0% Mounted on /dev/shm

[alexismya2]

uname
Linux host.xxxxxx.com 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp #1 SMP 005 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

[Rich-Boy]

Ok, that's confirmed that you are -quite- close to filling up that 80GB, now to find out where most of your storage is being used up. Paste the output of;

# cd / && du -sk * |sort -n

Note: it might take a few minutes to gather the info

[alexismya2]

ok thanks. Just ran it

[Rich-Boy]

Right.... and does that solve your problem?

[alexismya2]

Home 68041600
usr 1179208
proc 978523
var 774360
lib 116168
etc 20488
And others with less use

[alexismya2]

Remember when I do a back up it is under 2G

[alexismya2]

Why have I used up all my space if my website is under 2 G? By the way, thanks for your help

[Rich-Boy]

Are you saying that you only expect your server to have used up 2GB?
You only have 1.3GB available on the server so if the backup of your website is anywhere near this amount then this is the reason you cannot backup. Your /home/ is taking up most of the space (64GB) so i would advise that you perform the same du command i mentioned inside /home to see which user is taking up the most hard disk space.

[alexismya2]

Please tell me how to do perform the same du command inside /home.

[Rich-Boy]

# cd /home && du -sk * |sort -n

[alexismya2]

THANK YOU! OH MY. It says I have 62821760 backup

[Rich-Boy]

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&hs=0AP&q=62821760+kilobytes+in+gigabytes&btnG=Search&meta=

That'll be it then :)

Edit;
for future reference you may find this command easier on the eye
# du -h --max-depth 1 /home/ |sort -n

[alexismya2]

Ok. I need your help deperately now then. I don't see this anywhere in direct admin. Our backup folder in DA says 1.6G. So where is this folder that has the 60G? And where do I go in Direct Admin to stop the automatic backups that must be occurring?

[Rich-Boy]

I suggest that you seriously consider reading up on basic Linux administration, in my opinion you should be adept in at least locating, identifying and deleting directories/files. This might be a good starting point;
http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php

[Rich-Boy]

http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/commands.htm < looks good too

[littleoak]

Alex,

Send me an email if you like and I'll help you with this (for free).

[alexismya2]

Thank you so much for your help! The information you have given me is invaluable. Thank you so so much.

[alexismya2]

Thank you and I sent you email.

[littleoak]

I received your email and replied. It will be from christopher (me) at littleoak.

[alexismya2]

Thank You So Much Littleoak!! Also Thank You Rich-boy!!!

[nobaloney]

Forget your backup directories. Backup is probably crashing before it finishes. You can't trust anything in the backup directories.

Post the output of these commands:

# cd /home
# du -sh /home | grep G

Then for each output line, do the du -sh command for that directory.

Jeff

[littleoak]

Jeff,

I took a look at her server. She had a nightly cron set up to back up using the system backup. I removed the extra system backups.

[nobaloney]

Good idea ;).

Jeff

[klaver]

simple nifty script to clean up old backup files and keep your disk clean. Create a new file 'del-old-data.sh' and put it in your /home/backup directory with the following content:



#!/bin/bash
# Keep the 21 newest entries in the directory where this script is located, and delete everything else older.
i=1;
max=21;
DIR=`dirname $0`
THIS=`basename $0`
cd $DIR
for file in `ls -1Bt --color=no $DIR | grep -v $THIS` ; do
if (let "$i>$max"); then
rm -rf $file;
fi;
let i++;
done


give it execute rights:
chmod 700 /home/backup/del-old-data.sh

and create some cronjob to run this script every day:
crontab -e
add:
5 5 * * * /home/backup/del-old-data.sh