Missing free disk space

Question

I'm out of space, my system and storage have been running slowly lately. The harddisk LED seems to be on continuously.

My root partition is 8Gb, with 2.7Gb free space. But when I boot from live-cd, decrypt my root storage then sort all the files and open properties I see only 3.9Gb total. But the free space is still 2.7Gb.

What is happening? Where is my free disk space gone? Do I need to defrag, to clean, to shrink or do something on my root storage? This always happens a few months after I do a clean install of my system.

Edit:
lbtusr@lbtusr-system:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1,5G 0 1,5G 0% /dev
tmpfs 295M 4,6M 291M 2% /run
/dev/mapper/lubuntu--vg-root 7,4G 4,5G 2,6G 64% /
tmpfs 1,5G 76K 1,5G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5,0M 0 5,0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 1,5G 0 1,5G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 2,0G 0 2,0G 0% /var/tmp
tmpfs 2,0G 4,0K 2,0G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 472M 181M 267M 41% /boot
/dev/mapper/vhm-lhm 3,9G 2,1G 1,7G 56% /home
tmpfs 295M 12K 295M 1% /run/user/1000
/home/lbtusr/.Private 3,9G 2,1G 1,7G 56% /home/lbtusr

lbtusr@lbtusr-system:~$ sudo du -sh /
[sudo] password for lbtusr:
8,7G /

Could you please update your question with the output of df -h and du -sh /. — Soren A, Mar 13 '18 at 15:11
8 GB does not seem like very much - you'd possibly get better performance with more or just more free space. — Jonas Czech, Mar 13 '18 at 15:13
Possible duplicate of How do I find out which version and derivative of Ubuntu is right for my hardware in terms of minimal system requirements? for the recommended hard disk size to allocate for Ubuntu and How to resize partitions? — karel, Mar 13 '18 at 15:25
@DavidFoerster Easy peasy. 8GB is not enough disk space, so Somone Elsess needs to look up the recommended disk space (in the linked question) as I mentioned and afterwards resize the partition to allocate more disk space to it so that it will be large enough to keep from getting the missing free disk space error. — karel, Mar 16 '18 at 12:40

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 13 '18 at 21:57

What is happening, where is my free disk space gone?

ext3/ext4 file systems have 5% of the available space reserved by default. You can use the tune2fs command to change that number to something lower. Apparently it is even feasible to not reserve any free space, though for myself I wouldn't set it below 1%.

Missing free disk space

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