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My /dev/sda6 says I only have 4.7G available but still use% is 99? It does not make sense.

Can someone help me with this?

waybackdrm@dolansroadbike:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           784M  2.5M  781M   1% /run
/dev/sda6       260G  242G  4.7G  99% /

I try the following:

sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get clean

doesn't seem to do anything?

Any feedback? also let me know if I need more screenshots?

phuclv
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Dolan McElmurry
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    FYI: /root is a different directory to the root / directory. /root is the home directory of the root user (which is disabled by default in Ubuntu) so when you mention the root ('/') directory ensure you separate the two with at least a space (better if more than that too) – guiverc Feb 21 '21 at 04:14

1 Answers1

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Because some of the space is reserved. You can check it by running

tune2fs -l /dev/sda6 | grep 'Reserved'

By default 5% will be reserved for the root, which is 260G * 0.05 = 13G. That means the available space to you is only ~247G. ext4 itself also needs some space for its metadata, so you're already almost full

To reduce the reserved space run tune2fs -m$PERCENT $PARTITION. For example to reduce it to 1% in your case run

tune2fs -m1 /dev/sda6

But it's only a temporary solution. Having a full disk is not a good idea anyway since there isn't enough space for a contiguous region for new files or to move old files around, so fragmentation will increase significantly. You should consider cleaning up your disk and/or upgrade disk space

See

phuclv
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  • He has a full disk, lowering the reserved space is not going to help much. –  Feb 21 '21 at 03:22
  • @HappyTux of course it's not a good idea but it gives the OP sometime while waiting for upgrading the disk. Especially if that's a company PC then it's not easy to upgrade at all, processes are just so slow – phuclv Feb 21 '21 at 03:26
  • okay thanks for the feedback and help! oh and I forgot to mention it's a dual boot PC, running Ubuntu and Windows 10. – Dolan McElmurry Feb 21 '21 at 04:53
  • @DolanMcElmurry it has nothing to do with the OS. It's just a feature of the file system. And if my answer helps you, please click the green check mark to accept it – phuclv Feb 21 '21 at 05:22
  • He has a full disk, lowering the reserved space is not going to help much. said, true. I will do more digging. I see some areas where I can get rid of stuff,etc to get more space. – Dolan McElmurry Feb 21 '21 at 05:26
  • Interesting enough I see in other posts about Low disc space many insights that I don't see here to solving said Low Space. So I might as well just delete this question. – Dolan McElmurry Feb 21 '21 at 05:28