[Solved]What is taking up my space?

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guest253
White ninja
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Joined: 27 Feb 2016, 10:50
Distribution: Poreteus Nemesis
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[Solved]What is taking up my space?

Post#1 by guest253 » 29 Feb 2016, 05:09

I recently installed Porteus Nemesis as the only OS on my hd in my latop. When I open up the file manager, it states on the bottom right that I have 865.5 GiB free out of a total of 916.8 GiB. I still have a lot of space left but I am just wondering, how did I end up consuming 50 GiB in just a day? I cannot figure out what is taking up so much space.

Here is an output of the 'du -sh *' command I performed as root on '/'.

Code: Select all

root / # du -sh *
0	bin
0	boot
0	dev
20M	etc
du: cannot access 'home/guest/.gvfs': Permission denied
2.8G	home
3.8M	include
0	lib
0	lib64
du: cannot access 'mnt/live/proc/8342/task/8342/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'mnt/live/proc/8342/task/8342/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'mnt/live/proc/8342/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access 'mnt/live/proc/8342/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
5.8G	mnt
0	opt
53K	root
608K	run
0	sbin
0	srv
6.4M	tmp
2.1G	usr
212M	var
I am sure that the above sizes do not add up to 50 GiB. Is this normal? I haven't installed much besides firefox, flash, redshift, thermald, and other upgrades. Does this have something to do with the fact that Poreus is a "live" OS? If my Porteus takes up so much space, would it even run on my 32 GiB usb drive?

Also, my laptop is suppose to have 1TB of storage space, so I expected a total size of at least 950 GiB. What took up almost 90 GiB of space?

Sorry if these are basic questions, but I just cannot seem to wrap my head around this.

On a side note, what are those errors I am getting? If such files or directories do not exist, how does 'du -sh *' even know that its suppose to search for them? What kind of wtichcraft is this? If it doesn't exist in the first place, how do you even know about it?
Last edited by guest253 on 29 Feb 2016, 22:48, edited 1 time in total.

donald
Full of knowledge
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Posts: 2065
Joined: 17 Jun 2013, 13:17
Distribution: Porteus 3.2.2 XFCE 32bit
Location: Germany

Re: What is taking up my space?

Post#2 by donald » 29 Feb 2016, 20:11

Hello guest253

How much space is occupied by Files and Folders on your HDD/Partition.?
root@localhost:/mnt/sda1# du -sh
539M
(porteus + changes running from a 2GB ext2 patition)

--> du: cannot access...<--
Nothing to worry about
(/proc for example is a pseudo filesystem)
If you need a deeper technical explanation -- google
(my english isn't good enough)

In general, it's important to understand how porteus works.
Which part is physical stored on your HDD; and what is only built into RAM.

guest253
White ninja
White ninja
Posts: 11
Joined: 27 Feb 2016, 10:50
Distribution: Poreteus Nemesis
Location: iDontFeelSafeSharingThisInfo

Re: What is taking up my space?

Post#3 by guest253 » 29 Feb 2016, 22:47

@donald Thanks for taking the time to help me out.

If I use the 'du -sh' command after using 'cd /mnt/live/mnt/sda1', the terminal outputs 5.1 G.
If I use the 'du -sh' command after using 'cd /', the terminal outputs 17 G.

Upon further inspection, the directory /mnt/live/mnt/sda1/porteus/changes is taking up 4.7 G.

The 300 MB porteus nemesis iso I downloaded grew quite fast.

I think I may have found my answer for the missing storage space. Now I feel bad for not google searching this before... :oops:

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