Re: [tlug] Disappearing Disk Space

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

GENERAL UPDATE:

On 12/30/2015 02:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>   > 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.
A brief update to report that I may have solved the problem, comment on 
some strange things, and to say I figured a bunch of stuff out on my own.

About a week ago, my 9Gb root partition, which usually has 1.5~2 Gb 
free, suddenly filled up to bursting, allowing no additional input 
anywhere.  I ran parted from a USB disk and attempted to add 2Gb to the 
root partition by shrinking my main partition and moving my swap file so 
that I could expand root.

Didn't work.  For some reason trying to shrink my main partition caused 
parted to freeze.

So, I shrunk my swap file and expanded my root partition by 2Gb and when 
I logged back in, got a pile of error messages.  I had to manually log 
into my desktop using startx and, when I ran my file manager in root 
mode, discovered four files with 128-character names that took up a 
little over 2Gb in the root partition.  I erased them.  Got a "files 
available for upgrade" message, so I ran the upgrade and rebooted, only 
to find that Claws Mail, LibreOffice, Iceweasel, and Skype all refused 
to start.

So, I plugged the USB disk back in and resized everything back to its 
initial values.  I then followed the suggested steps to run fsck in 
manual mode -- which involves typing in "fsck /dev/sda(x)" and holding 
down the "Y" key for 30 minutes while sectors get fixed, one-by-one.  A 
tablet with your current reading materials on it is a good thing to have 
close at hand.

After rebooting, I received messages that Claws Mail, Iceweasel, and 
LibreOffice all had upgrades available, which fixed all of their 
problems.  Skype took some creative rerouting of the libGL.so.1 file 
(HINT: the first seven suggested online fixes don't work for anything 
other than Ubuntu 12~14).  And VirtualBox upgraded.  The upgrade borked 
a bunch of stuff that needed fixing, most of the problem caused by the 
MS installation verification police, but that's another story.

But, what I wanted to report was that, suddenly, about 240Gb of empty 
space suddenly appeared on my HDD and everything seems to run faster.

--
CL