Hd space getting full very fast?

[skoena]

My hd space is getting very full very fast. Today at least 20gb is filled up. How can I check where this space is going?

I only can see this:

ext3 394G 340G 34G 92% /

Rudolf.

[mzerbe]

Logon as root and type

$ man du

Read the man page and afterwards you can start analyzing, there are plenty of options that might be useful to you.

[skoena]

I did

du -h -s *

on the /

and got this:

40K abook.php
4.0K atmailopen
1.8M atmailopen-1.01.tgz
4.0K atmail.php
3.3M backup
65M backups
6.1M bin
27M boot
0 cdrom
4.0K CHANGELOG
8.0K compose.php
160K dev
21M etc
4.0K favicon.ico
4.0K header.php
20M home
5.2M html
1.2M imgs
4.0K index.html
4.0K index.php
0 initrd.img
0 initrd.img.old
556K install
456K javascript
2.1M lang
12K lang.php
8.0K ldap.php
210M lib
1.9M libs
12K LICENSE
16K lost+found
4.0K luna
8.0K media
8.0K mime.php
503G mnt
20K modules
4.0K opt
12K parse.php
24K plugins
du: cannot access `proc/11539/task/11539/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/11539/task/11539/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/11539/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/11539/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
0 proc
28K quota.group
36K quota.user
16K reademail.php
4.0K README
14M root
7.0M sbin
72K scripts
20K search.php
4.0K selinux
12K sendmail.php
16K share
32K showmail.php
4.0K spell.php
4.0K srv
4.0K ssl
0 sys
28M tmp
12K users
1006M usr
28K util.php
18G var
4.0K videomail.php
0 vmlinuz
0 vmlinuz.old

(the /mnt is a external drive)

Still I don't know why my system eat about 200gb in a few days and only got 3% left and still eating.

Please somebody some more ideas? What is eating my diskspace?

[skoena]

Strange things happened.
Yesterday the server had 0% space left. Sites were down because no space left on the hd's.
I restarted the server, it took a long time, and the hd space has returned to 5% used.

What could be the problem?

[till]

Maybe you have a problem with temporary files. You shoudl run the du command once a day and check were the usage grows and then go into this subdirectory to check which files grow or get added there.

[skoena]

Originally Posted by till

Maybe you have a problem with temporary files. You shoudl run the du command once a day and check were the usage grows and then go into this subdirectory to check which files grow or get added there.

But strange thing is that when I runned the

du -h -s *

it didn't show me where the 300gb went. The biggest folder was the /var folder with 18gb. And after the restart the 300gb was back.

[till]

The biggest folder is /mnt with > 500GB. Maybe you run a backup job and the backup device is not mounted correctly, so that you do the backup to the main harddisk instead.

[skoena]

Originally Posted by till

The biggest folder is /mnt with > 500GB. Maybe you run a backup job and the backup device is not mounted correctly, so that you do the backup to the main harddisk instead.

Your're right, but this mounted network drive still has 500gb free space.
What could be is that device was not mounted correctly and that the backups are stored on the main hd. However my backupscript when it performs a Full Backup (on Monday at 2.02am) it consumes around 20gb and not 300gb.

And yesterday at 18.00 when the hd was full (0% left) it normally doesn't have a backupjob running.