Disk Space Challenges

[richlich]

We have an RHEL 5 machine that is running out of disk space on one of its volumes. I've done what, as a newbie, I know to safely recover disk space by, for example, tarring mysqldump output and expanded installation packages no longer needed. Where else might I look for space to recover?

Many thanks in advance for your help!

[Rubberman]

Without knowing what's on your drive, it would be difficult to say what you can do. Creating compressed tarballs of log files and auto-generated backup files and moving those to off-line storage often helps. Just remember that old system management rule, data (stuff) expands to fill available storage space, plus 10%.

[ghostdog74]

We have an RHEL 5 machine that is running out of disk space on one of its volumes. I've done what, as a newbie, I know to safely recover disk space by, for example, tarring mysqldump output and expanded installation packages no longer needed. Where else might I look for space to recover?

Many thanks in advance for your help!

you can use the find command to look for file with size more than a certain amount..eg

find /path -type f -size +100M

search for files more than 100M

[bigtomrodney]

There's a great Gnome tool called baobab, it may already be installed on your system. It's sometimes listed as "Disk Usage Analyzer". It will give you a graphical representation of your filesystem or a particular folder in terms of their relative size.

Be prepared to be surprised, it can be quite surprising to find out what's actually using your space. I suspect you'll find a lot in /var in terms of logs either way.

[Rubberman]

Both ghostdog74 and bigtomrodneys' suggestions are very useful! I forgot about the find -size option. A lot of these tools have a number of lesser-used capabilities that can easily be overlooked or forgotten. I'm checking out baobab on my system now just to see what it does. Thanks folks!

[bigtomrodney]

I prefer the ring chart myself in baobab Rubberman, but the tree view can be quite helpful. Notice you can zoom in and out too for better analysis.