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Linux, no space left on device

Published Nov 05 2020

I was having some strange problems with a Linux Ubuntu server, so I logged into the server and looked up the Apache error log, in /var/apache2/error.log.

It was full of No space left on device errors.

😱

“How is it possible??” that was my first thought.

I tried running df and yes, the disk was 100% full.

To find what was causing this problem, I cleared up some space using

sudo apt-get clean

and I installed the ncdu utility:

sudo apt-get install ncdu

and after running it from /, I found out one specific folder was holding 90% of the data.

One of my backup scripts was writing the database logs in there, before sending them to another server, and each one was 80MB. One every day.. you can imagine how all those Gigabytes were filled.

It took a while to fill, almost a year. But it did.

I removed all those files, voilà, Linux server working perfectly again.

End of the story.