Reclaiming disk space
A full disk takes services down in confusing ways. The fix is methodical, not frantic: find what is using the space before you delete anything.
Find the consumers
Work top-down from the largest directories rather than deleting at random. Usual suspects: runaway logs, old package caches, forgotten backups and dumps, and container images and layers. A couple of commands point straight at the biggest offenders — chase those first.
The deleted file still holding space
A classic trap: you delete a huge log but the space does not come back, because a process still has the file open. The space frees only when that process is restarted or reloaded. If the numbers do not add up after a delete, this is usually why.
Stop the next one
- Rotate and cap logs so they cannot grow without limit.
- Put volatile data on its own volume so filling it cannot take down the root filesystem — LVM helps.
- Alert on disk usage before it is critical, through monitoring, so a full disk is a warning and not an outage.
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