Disk usage confusion

[ham_redhatter]

Hi there,

I seem to have encountered a 'problem' with the storage on my HDD.

When i 'du -skh /home/Data' , i get :

243G /home/Data

And when i 'du -skh /home/Data/*' , i get :

122G /home/Data/
64G /home/Data/Clients
51M /home/Data/For_Transfers
8.0K /home/Data/Onrig_Runs
58G /home/Data/Runs

NOW, when i do 'du -skh *' from within /home/Data i get :

122G
64G Clients
51M For_Transfers
8.0K Onrig_Runs
58G Runs

It seems like there is 122G being used but i can 'ls' it. Is it perhaps hidden somewhere?

It does not come up with df ot fdisk

Help!

[Rubberman]

It isn't showing you incorrectly. Each example is totaling about 243G (more or less). There are 122G in files in the /home/Data directory, and about the same in sub-directories. So, you aren't "missing" 122G.

[Rubberman]

You should also be aware that links of various sorts will skew the results of the du command. It is only intended as an advisory tool, and not something to base system resource allocations on. For example, if I have a hard link to a mongo big database that is elsewhere on the disc, my directory will show that as part of the results returned from du. If that were considered part of my quota, then I would be toast. It also traverses links to other file systems and counts those as well, unless you include the -x option. Please read the du manpage to get a better understanding how to use it more effectively.

[Rubberman]

Finally, an example of how du can be mis-interpreted. On my system, my /home file system is a 2TB array. It is about 52% used right now, leaving about 860GB available. However when I run "du /home/mydir" it traverses all my links - including my NAS arrays, eSata drives, and usb drive(s). It comes back and tells me that I am using 1.7TB of space, though I know that is impossible! Caveat User!