0 bytes free at root but disc has gigs free

General Help
#1

I have just copied gigabytes of files from my old windows machine to my new Zorin OS 15.3 Ultimate system. The system is warning me that there are 0 bytes free at root. The disc app shows the 2 partitions of the 1T M.2 storage device. The OS partition has 530 Mb free and the Home partition has 214 Gb free. I cannot find anything on this forum regarding this type of message. What do I need to do? Thanks in advance.

Update: I just found and executed this line from an ubuntu forum: dpkg --get-selections | grep “linux-image-[[:digit:]].*” | tr “\t” “;” | cut -d “;” -f1

The output is:
linux-image-5.4.0-45-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-47-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-48-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-51-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-52-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-53-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-54-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-56-generic
linux-image-5.4.0-58-generic

Update 2: I just freed up 213 Mb by executing ```

sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get autoremove

It did not remove any of what I think 
are old kernels ... the 'linux-image...' 
files. I am not comfortable in deleting
what may be old and unneeded kernels
without knowing for certain that I can.

df -h
Filesystem              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                    7,8G     0  7,8G   0% /dev
tmpfs                   1,6G  2,1M  1,6G   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2          916G  716G  154G  83% /
tmpfs                   7,9G  152M  7,7G   2% /dev/shm
tmpfs                   5,0M     0  5,0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs                   7,9G     0  7,9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/nvme0n1p1          511M  6,1M  505M   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs                   1,6G   16K  1,6G   1% /run/user/122
tmpfs                   1,6G   84K  1,6G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/mapper/truecrypt1  232G  207G   26G  89% /media/truecrypt1
#2

Where is your home folder on that list (df -h)? I can’t see it.

I have kernel versions 58 and 56 on mine, so you should be fine getting rid of 54 and older. My 2 cents is to use Synaptic.

PS - You’re sure your trash isn’t using up a lot of space? That is all I can think of.

#3

Thanks for your reply. I now suspect directory corruption. When I examined the root directory using the file manager, I found 2 files and 1 folder with red dots with white x’s in them. The swapfile, vmlinuz and root (folder).

#4

Ok, so the red dots with white x’s indicate that I do not have access, not that the file structure is damaged. I found that timeshift has been storing the backups at root … and the storage space used was enormous. So I elevated Nautilus and deleted it. I do not know how to verify that I now have sufficient space other than to just wait to see if I get warning messages from the system. I do not know what utility is issuing the warnings. Meanwhile, I will see if I can direct timeshift to save to a USB connected drive.

#5

You can always use the “Disks” utility to quickly see how much occupied/free space you have in your individual disk partitions.

#6

Thanks zabadabadoo. There is a problem with that. I did check the disk space in this way while I was getting the ‘no bytes’ warnings. It showed that there were 530 Mb of space out of 537Mb available in the root file system. This is what it said before I deleted the timeshift folder. There seems to be some other constraint on disk space that is not reflected in the Disks utility. That is why I wish I knew what process is issuing the warnings so that I could see if I helped anything by deleting the timeshift folder.

#7

@JimH. I find the “Disk Analyser” utility also quite useful during my disk space hunting investigations.
I wonder if this item may be of some use to you:

1 Like
#8

Thanks. I did find the material useful. I also have been using the disk analyser. The Disks utility leaves me confused. When, using a terminal, I cd to /, I can climb through a directory tree that looks just as I would expect. When I look at the Disks utility, it appears that there are two partitions on my m.2 storage device: /dev/nvme0n1p1 and /dev/nvme0n1p2. I did not partition my device. It was brand new when I installed Zorin OS and I let the install process do its own thing. Further, I have timeshift configured to store its images on nvme0n1p2, but they are appearing in nvme0n1p1. The other ‘partition’ does not show up as an option in timeshift. Am I dealing with links here? There is free storage space all over the place. I do not understand what is limiting /root such that I was getting warnings of 0 bytes before I deleted the timeshift folder. I do not seem to be getting those warnings now. I think I need to go looking for a place to post timeshift questions.

#9

Re reading your first post. Was everything ok before you copied stuff accross from your Windows machine. Do you know what partition arrangements were prior to that event?

What filesystem (formatting) do you have on your 1T M.2 SSD?

#10
  1. Everything was ok before copying the info from Windows and everything is ok now that I discovered and removed the /timeshift folder. I then created a new timeshift snapshot to see how much space the new timeshift folder used. Although the doc that I read said that timeshift would only backup system files, it actually also backed up much of the windows data. The new /timeshift folder is holding 447 gigs. The windows data I copied was 432 gigs. Before, the /timeshift folder contained many snapshots. I disabled timeshift until I can understand exactly how to configure it. I cannot afford to make errors with backup software.
  2. The M.2 device had never been used before I installed Zorin OS. I let Zorin handle formatting, partitioning, etc. I see that there are 2 partitions. There is an EFI partition that is FAT. The second partition is ext4. The EFI partition is 537 Mb with 530 free. The ext4 partition is shown as 1 T with 27gigs free.

I found that timeshift was set to do a snapshot every hour. I guessing that I was receiving the 0 bytes available message everytime timeshift attempted (and probably failed) to make another snapshot. I had selected rsync as the type of snapshot.

Today, I am going to install a 2 T hard disc that I have. I will erase it and set it as the storage device for timeshift.

#11

6 posts were split to a new topic: Filesystems and SSD’s