root partition full

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…] I see no swap partition so I assume you have a swap file as is the default these days. It's probably larger than 1GB. I suggest moving it off the root partition to your /home partition instead. These are both easily accomplished.
[…]

Good detection! And a good tip for a temporary solution.

[oshunluvr]

snaps. That's all I need to say. Anyway...

Check /tmp and consider mounting tmpfs in RAM instead of on the drive. I see no swap partition so I assume you have a swap file as is the default these days. It's probably larger than 1GB. I suggest moving it off the root partition to your /home partition instead. These are both easily accomplished.

As far as your early comments re. /backup, most people agree that a backup needs to be on another drive at a minimum to truly function as a backup. The best backups in order of best to least are;

1. On-line via a service
2. On another PC preferably in a different physical location
3. On another drive or external device

If someone suggested the /backup partition as a way to store backups of "important" files, it's the lowest form of a backup. You'd be better off with an external USB device or a backup service. I'm pretty sure you can still get 50GB storage on Box for free.

So assuming my above opinion counts for something and you agree that partition is rather useless, there are a couple ways you can remedy this situation by using the space taken by /backup.

1. You can boot to a live gparted USB stick and delete the /backup partition, move your /home to the end of the drive, then expand the root partition. This can be somewhat dangerous. I have done it many, many times but not 100% successfully. Don't even consider it unless you have a true backup first.
2. As much safer and less time consuming option is to move the contents of /var to the /backup partition and mount /backup as /var instead.

Number 1 is more organized or neater in a way, since you'll have a "normal" installation. Number 2 is safer, faster, and will work fine. In the "olden" days it was common to distribute various parts of a Linux OS across multiple drives both for space (drives were much smaller) and for performance reasons. These benefits really no longer exist, but Linux is well suited to being split up in this manner.

Finally, I wouldn't be me if I didn't point out how using BTRFS instead of EXT4 would have avoided this problem. Instead of having a less than half empty /home and a full /, you would have one 180GB (sda5+sda6) partition at about 50% full and both the root OS and Home subvolumes sharing the free space. Kind of a difficult transition at this point, but maybe for a later install...

[Schwarzer Kater]

You could post the output of sudo du -hd1 -x / again as jlittle suggested.
You should also add the -x flag to not count the mounted volumes in e.g. /boot, /mnt or /media .
Edit: But I saw now that you used ncdu in your first post.

Above we can see a big /snap and /var/lib/snapd amongst others (you seem to use docker, too) as expected…

Edit 2: For aesthetic reason, please remove the FONT and COLOR tags from your CODE (I was fooled a bit - it would have been easier to read for me if you posted the command and the working directory or used the full path in the command, too - my bad…).

PS: You could also post sudo fdisk -l, lsblk -e7 and lsblk -f -e7 so we can help you resizing partitions for the future with this information (to resize partitions start from a GParted usb live stick, make a working backup to another storage medium first!, … - but I suggest that you post here first to be sure).

[Robert24]

Thank you all for your answers. I'm amazed how kind people are on this forum. I reply a bit late because I was sleeping (I live in Europe). I have to head to my job now so I will try the various solutions you suggested tonight, but I'll still post the information some of you required:

jlittle The output of

sudo du -hd1

in /var/lib is

4.0K    ./private 
4.0K    ./usb_modeswitch
4.0K    ./ieee-data
8.0K    ./ispell
4.0K    ./dhcp
4.0K    ./avahi-autoipd
4.0K    ./misc
16K     ./libreoffice
64K     ./bluetooth
4.0K    ./mysql-files
8.0K    ./whoopsie
1.8M    ./fwupd
16K     ./grub
8.0K    ./plymouth
4.0K    ./aptitude
60K     ./ghostscript
8.0K    ./gems
4.0K    ./hp
104K    ./tex-common
32K     ./dictionaries-common
4.0K    ./python
704K    ./usbutils
109M    ./dpkg
456K    ./smartmontools
4.0K    ./dbus
29M     ./sddm
12K     ./sgml-base
60K     ./upower
3.4M    ./apt-xapian-index
736K    ./systemd
22M     ./plocate
8.0K    ./sudo
4.0K    ./acpi-support
4.0K    ./power-profiles-daemon
4.0K    ./boltd
8.0K    ./logrotate
3.5M    ./command-not-found
32K     ./xml-core
12K     ./locales
8.0K    ./ubiquity
219M    ./apt
8.0K    ./vim
4.0K    ./snmp
3.8M    ./ubuntu-advantage
8.0K    ./os-prober
8.0K    ./apport
6.1G    ./snapd
52K     ./polkit-1
60M     ./texmf
4.0K    ./ubuntu-release-upgrader
8.0K    ./ubuntu-drivers-common
4.0K    ./geoclue
12K     ./AccountsService
8.0K    ./samba
4.1M    ./aspell
60K     ./NetworkManager
4.0K    ./man-db
20K     ./update-notifier
8.0K    ./udisks2
20K     ./alsa
4.0K    ./unattended-upgrades
2.8G    ./docker
4.0K    ./tpm
8.0K    ./shim-signed
38M     ./swcatalog
4.0K    ./git
8.0K    ./xkb
8.0K    ./xfonts
28K     ./pam
12K     ./update-manager
120K    ./PackageKit
3.5M    ./ucf
24K     ./emacsen-common
244K    ./containerd
8.0K    ./colord
9.3G    .
​

Snowhog The output of

df -hT --exclude-type=tmpfs --exclude-type=devtmpfs​

is

Filesystem     Type     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on 
/dev/sda5      ext4      24G   23G  481M  98% /
/dev/sda6      ext4     158G   69G   81G  47% /home
/dev/sda1      vfat     256M   36M  221M  14% /boot/efi
/dev/sda3      fuseblk  267G  258G  9.5G  97% /media/me/Windows
/dev/sda8      ext4      20G   24K   19G   1% /media/me/backup

[Snowhog]

In a konsole type: df -hT --exclude-type=tmpfs --exclude-type=devtmpfs

Copy/paste the results.

[jlittle]

• /var/lib looks a bit much. Do you have any docker containers or images? IME they can proliferate there unnoticed. Otherwise running sudo du -hd1 in /var/lib might reveal the problem.
• /var/log - if files in the journal directory are taking the space, sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=50M prunes archived journals to 50 MB.
• sudo du -hxd1 / on my work laptop says 19 GB. Your 24.4 GB looks a bit tight... you might be in for some partition juggling. I use btrfs where the linux root is a subvolume and free space is pooled, so I don't have to worry about shuffling space.

[GreyGeek]

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/resize...tition-safely/

[Schwarzer Kater]

Three thoughts to quickly make 1-2 GiB availabe:

• erase old log files in /var/log
• sudo snap remove firefox if you don't insist on using the Snap and install Firefox to the other partition in /home/$USER/Applications (or another place in /home/$USER if you prefer) instead, following Debian' s installation suggestion (https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#From_Mozilla_binaries).
  Be sure to replace /opt with your users's Applications directory (or your chosen place in /home/$USER) for extraction and in the .desktop file.
• clean APT cache with sudo apt clean

[Robert24]

Hello,

It's been a while that I didn't post any question to this forum because my Kubuntu 22.04 is very stable and I have almost never any issue. But today, I just saw a notification telling me

your root partition is running out of disk space, you have 133 mib remaining (0%).

which freaks me out.
I have to admit that I never dug into the meaning of the different partitions on my computer. I think I followed recommendation last time that I re-installed Kubuntu (it was years ago) and didn't bother too much. I regret it now. I have difficulty understanding what is the thing taking more place than it should. Here is my set-up regarding the partitions:

266 GiB for Windows
24.4 GiB for /
161 GiB for /home
19.3 GiB for backup

Now, I have to be frank, beside the difference Windows, linux, it's quite vague for me what is what. I observe that the backup partition is completely empty. I don't know if I'm supposed to do something to use it for some automatic task or if it is used by people who recommend it in the same way that I use hard drives: just dump important files there to save them in case something bad happens to the /home partition.

For the root partition which seems to be full. I googled a bit and learned about the ncdu and the du commands. The first one is a bit easier to use, so for now I'll stick to it. I post here what I get for the main "suspects" (I will only display the top lines):
At /

. 256.2 GiB [##########] /media
.  68.5 GiB [##        ] /home
.  12.6 GiB [          ] /snap
  10.1 GiB [          ] /usr
.   7.0 GiB [          ] /var
. 678.8 MiB [          ] /opt

at /snap

   2.3 GiB [##########] /gnome-42-2204
   1.8 GiB [#######   ] /gnome-3-38-2004
   1.7 GiB [#######   ] /wine-platform-runtime
   1.2 GiB [#####     ] /firefox
   1.2 GiB [#####     ] /gnome-3-28-1804
 944.6 MiB [###       ] /wine-platform-6-stable

at /usr

   4.6 GiB [##########] /lib
   4.2 GiB [######### ] /share
 601.0 MiB [#         ] /bin
 280.2 MiB [          ] /src

at /var

.   5.2 GiB [##########] /lib
.   1.6 GiB [###       ] /log
. 201.2 MiB [          ] /cache

If you have an idea of how I should proceed to solve this issue or what next step I could do, or if anything above looks suspicious, I would be very grateful if you can share it with me.

Thank you for your time and have a nice day.