I’ve had an Ubuntu 22.04 setup going for around a year, and over that year I’ve had to increase the size of the partition holding my /var folder multiple times. I’m now up to 20GB and again running into problems, mainly installing new apps, because that partition is again nearly full. I’ve used commands sudo apt clean and sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500 to temporarily clear up some space, but it doesn’t take long to fill back up, and gets less effective with time, til I have no choice but to expand the partition again.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it normal to need 20GB+ for var? Is there a way to safely reclaim space I don’t know about?

  • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    There’s a way to figure out what is responsible for using up all of that space. A couple of ways, really. Here’s the one I use, though: du -s -h -x /path/to/ | sort -h -r | head -n 10*

    • du
      • -s - display only a total for each argument
      • -h - human readable values
      • -x - do not cross file systems (in case you have another directory tree mounted under /var, which’ll complicate figuring out what’s in there for this purpose)
    • sort
      • -h - compare human readable numbers (e.g., 1G, 2T)
      • -r - reverse sort (biggest first)
    • head
      • -n 10 (first ten lines or less)
    • example@reddthat.com
      5·
      1 year ago

      ncdu makes it even easier if you want to interactively browse through folders to see which files exactly are eating up space