[tlug] Disappearing Disk Space

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

CL writes:

 > Over the past few months, I've noticed small amounts of hard disk space 
 > disappearing from my desktop machine.

I would suspect log files, especially if you have any ports that
aren't firewalled at the router (if they're firewalled on the machine
they may very likely be generating "suspicious packet" reports).

 > Is there a way to show and list all recent write activity and file
 > size change?

If you use a journaling file system, there are debug utilities that
can summarize the journal for you.  Also, journals by their very
nature create "duplicate" content.  I'm not sure how that gets
resolved by stat.

I also like the "sparse storage for VM disks" hypothesis Jens suggested.

 > I thought there was but am not finding it.  I confess that I may be
 > Googling the wrong question(s).

The best way to handle this is with a system that takes snapshots of
the disk allocation state (usually for security purposes, so these
applications would likely be in the "security" section of your package
distribution).