A weird 16TB file in my SSD

Question

Somehow, a file has appeared on my SSD which is larger than the SSD itself.
The file is 16 TB in size and is located on my /home partition which is only 220 GB. The path is (if that's relevant)

~/.local/share/zeitgeist/fts.index/postlist.glass

The sad part is I have no idea where this file came from or what zeitgeist is. This file has been on my PC for quite a few weeks without me noticing. I only discovered it after investigating my disk usage.

One thing I did notice the back-up software, the default for Ubuntu, did tell me every time that I needed 16 TB of back-up space. So that explains that.

Might be more of a bug though.

Running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

How did this happen and what can I do about it?

how did this happen and what can I do about it? Also, terminal also shows it has 16 TB — Kitty Saya, Jun 01 '20 at 18:37
I don't know... No idea what the file is. I already deleted it, and will keep an eye out for future occurrences. — Kitty Saya, Jun 01 '20 at 18:42
@Luigi_FS Can you please tell me the type of one of the glass files if you haven't deleted them yet ? ( via " file some_file.glass" ) . It's a quite weird type. I haven't seen that before. — Parsa Mousavi, Jun 01 '20 at 19:31

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 01 '20 at 19:30

This is the Zeitgeist logging program , one of the gnome activity management softwares which logs your activities in gnome systems to facilitate some tasks (like search history).

That size is not the actuall size of the file I think because it hasn't a definitive size for some reason and I don't know what the glass file format actually is. And as far as I know , zeitgeist is not installed in ubuntu by default.

You can safely delete the zeitgeist utility if you don't want it :

sudo apt-get remove zeitgeist*

To read more about it , take a look at here .

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 02 '20 at 03:49

It's easy in Linux to create a file that is larger than the partition. Take the following example where the partition size of / is 45 GB, and we can create a 100 GB file called foo:

$ lsblk

NAME         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1      259:0    0   477G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p9  259:9    0   7.9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─nvme0n1p7  259:7    0  23.1G  0 part /mnt/old
├─nvme0n1p5  259:5    0   859M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p3  259:3    0    16M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p1  259:1    0   450M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p8  259:8    0     9G  0 part /mnt/e
├─nvme0n1p10 259:10   0  27.2G  0 part /mnt/clone
├─nvme0n1p6  259:6    0  45.1G  0 part /
├─nvme0n1p4  259:4    0 363.2G  0 part /mnt/c
└─nvme0n1p2  259:2    0    99M  0 part /boot/efi
sdb            8:16   1  58.6G  0 disk 
sda            8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda4         8:4    0   450M  0 part 
├─sda2         8:2    0   128M  0 part 
├─sda5         8:5    0  11.4G  0 part 
├─sda3         8:3    0   919G  0 part /mnt/d
└─sda1         8:1    0   500M  0 part 

$ truncate -s 100G foo

$ ll foo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 107374182400 Jun  1 20:05 foo

$ ll -h foo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 100G Jun  1 20:05 foo

Although the file size created by truncate is 100G, no space is consumed until something is actually written to the file. In this case at least, it is safe to simply delete the file which doesn't exist in the real sense.

Pablo Bianchi · Answer 3 · 2020-10-08T18:50:32.387

0

That index is created by the Zeitgeist Full Text Search (FTS) Extension.

From there:

To force a full reindex you can thus, kill Zeitgeist (pkill zeitgeist)

then rm -rf ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/fts.index,

and finally just restart zeitgeist-daemon (with --replace)

edited Oct 08 '20 at 18:50

answered Jun 02 '20 at 03:50

Pablo Bianchi

15,657

A weird 16TB file in my SSD

3 Answers3