Re: [tlug] Disappearing Disk Space

[Jens Oliver John <lists@example.com>]

On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 11:44:38AM +0900, CL wrote:
> Over the past few months, I've noticed small amounts of hard disk space 
> disappearing from my desktop machine.  It is "only" a couple of Gb, and 
> I am not certain of the exact amount as I've been doing a lot of playing 
> around with virtual machine disks; adding and subtracting different 
> installations, but all of these have used fixed size disks.  I noticed 
> that over 1Gb of free space went away just before Christmas and doesn't 
> appear to be related to the recent Debian kernel upgrade.  I am not 
> finding any hidden files, either.
> 
> Is there a way to show and list all recent write activity and file size 
> change?  I thought there was but am not finding it.  I confess that I 
> may be Googling the wrong question(s).

Without any real clues, I would suggest you try a tool like ncdu[1] which
visualizes disk usage on a per-directory and finally per-file basis. This should
help you find all huge files.

If you are using virtual machines, chances are that the virtual hard disk was
created as a sparse file, meaning it has a virtual size X but takes up less
space on disk than X as long as the disk "isn't full".

[1] https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu