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I have 18.04 installed with root partition on a 128gb SSD and home on a 2tb hard drive. Looking at Nautilus to check on my free space (for no real reason, I was just curious) it says my SSD is using 106.5gb with 123gb available. I figured that must be including my home partition or something.

I just checked each folder inside / and the /proc folder, according to Nautilus, is 150.7TB. I don't even have that much storage in the entire system. Right-clicking the root drive in the title bar and choosing properties shows that the disk is actually using 10gb. My secondary drive does not show up in Nautilus, but I can just check the properties on my home folder to approximate that.

Both drives are encrypted with LUKS/LVM (whatever the Ubuntu installer used), with the secondary drive decrypting with a keyfile on the main drive.

I just want to know how this happens. It doesn't seem to be a problem that needs fixing, but maybe something is actually wrong. I used this answer to set up the encryption if that helps.

Zanna
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Miqued
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1 Answers1

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/proc is a virtual filesystem, it does not occupy real disk space as ext4 does for example.

A simplistic answer to your query, i.e. without going too much into the complexity of procfs, is that within /proc are core files, and they represent the virtual address space of the processes, which are as large as the address space your CPU can address. And you have multiple processes in a running system.

In short, ignore the claimed size of the /proc directory.

Zanna
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nobody special
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  • Thanks! I'm still concerned about the 106gb usage on / since it hasn't changed and my secondary drive has over 500gb of data on it right now... But I think that's another problem – Miqued Dec 20 '18 at 03:39
  • I use KDE, so don;t have Nautilus and not sure if it has bugs affecting disk usage. But you can go to command line and use df -h to check for disk usage and free space, and use du -h to get a file/directory usage, don't forget to ignore /proc from du, so just use specific paths like du -h /etc for example. – nobody special Dec 20 '18 at 14:39