Why am I getting low disk space usage?

Question

I have problems understanding my disk space usage. I am using Ubuntu 12.04. I am recently going low on disk space and I cannot understand why. Here is the result of du (only largest folders).

716.0K  Videos
1.1M    giorgio2.pdf
1.7M    2011_Thesis_Caroline_Ferdinand.pdf   
2.1M    031022_1.pdf
2.4M    dgfem
29.7M   aux
362.6M  Papers
479.3M  Desktop
588.6M  Documents
1.8G    vtk
3.0G    Dropbox
38.0G   Pictures
105.9G  Music

Here is the result of df -h

 Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
 /dev/sda6       322G  304G  1.4G 100% /
 udev            3.9G  4.0K  3.9G   1% /dev
 tmpfs           1.6G  940K  1.6G   1% /run
 none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock 
 none            3.9G  736K  3.9G   1% /run/shm

What I don't understand is where the 304G used come from. The result of du does not sum up to that amount. That make me difficult to free space (as you see I have only 1.4G available). What am I missing here?

I add an image of Disk Usage Analyzer. The point is that the first 10 largest folders sum up to less than 165G. But still my home folder uses 312G.

enter image description here

I had a similar problem with Ubuntu 12.10. See my question for further information. — Lucio, Jun 30 '13 at 18:01
Do you have the .xsession-errors.old file in your home directory? If so, what is the size of this one? — Lucio, Jun 30 '13 at 18:04
Yes, that seems to be the problem. It is 148.4G. What's the point of this huge file?? I guess I can delete it... — gg-79, Jun 30 '13 at 18:11
You should delete the file. I created a more generalized question here — Lucio, Jun 30 '13 at 18:25
Please, help us and create an entry on the bug report and sign it. Thanks! — Lucio, Jun 30 '13 at 20:04

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 03 '13 at 23:11

2

To get the largest files in a directory, including hidden dotfiles, try running:

du -h .* | sort -h

answered Jul 03 '13 at 23:11

AggieBill

95

Why am I getting low disk space usage?

1 Answers1

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