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I'm have an ext4 partition mounted on my machine and it's not full, but shows none available.

Its mounted r/w, I can delete files and when I do, the Used space goes down, but Available never goes up.

Any thoughts?

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
...
/dev/sdb7       604G  577G     0 100% /home/data
Robb Breckenridge
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1 Answers1

1

It's possible that you've used up all available inodes, meaning that whilst you do have space on the disk, you can't actually write to it. Try running this:

df -i

Where 'df' is 'disk filesystem', -i is 'inodes'. The output will look something like this:

chris@loki:~$ df -i
Filesystem      Inodes  IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
udev            500788    487  500301    1% /dev
tmpfs           505825    638  505187    1% /run
/dev/sda1      1835008 374975 1460033   21% /
tmpfs           505825     27  505798    1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           505825      5  505820    1% /run/lock
tmpfs           505825     16  505809    1% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           505825     24  505801    1% /run/user/1000

However, if 'IUse%' is 99-100% on your drive, the then that'd be the issue.

There's a bunch of reasons that all the inodes would be accounted for; in my experience as a server manager, for example, this would typically be caused by log files not being cleared out regularly enough (we're talking years) or verbose error logs being generated in to new text files over and over again. Could be anything in your case though, but more than likely caused by thousands of files being stored in certain directories for bad reasons.

The best way I found to find the source of such a problem is to run this from the root directory of the machine:

find / -xdev -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1 -rn | head

I'm sure there are better and more efficient ways though! The above isn't quite perfect.

The Pizza Overlord
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