Low storage place in Windows with Zorin VM

General Help
1

I have a virtual machine with Zorin on a Windows 11 laptop. Just see that there is only 8 GB on C: left! The partition C: is 160 GiB and there is only the VM with 50 GiB on it, shown in use are 28 GiB, and Win 11, no personal datas, only few apps installed. Is it possible that something is increasing so much? The laptop is very slow and hanging. I cleared the temporary storage and got 20 GiB free space.
How can I find out what causes the problem?

On my old laptop that has 128GiB totally and there are Win 11 and Linux Mint installed and there is no storage space problem.

2

Has /var been filling up with logs?

You might need to do some Spring cleaning.
No need to wait for Spring.

sudo apt clean && sudo apt autoremove

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=1M

Also, remember that Flatpaks are isolated from the system, so may not show how much space they are taking up by normal means...

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3

What are you using to create the virtual machines? VirtualBox? Check if there's an option to read logs from it, in case there's something that has gone wrong.

I don't think the guest OS (Zorin OS, in this case) can bleed through the virtualization layer that easily. If you've allocated 50 GB for that virtual machine, worst case scenario it would tell you that it's running out of space once it reaches that ceiling.

Just in case, you can run this command from within Zorin OS to have a rough idea of the space taken by all the top-level directories in total:

du -sh /* 2>/dev/null | sort -h

If needed, you can repeat the same command with lower level directories. For example if you want to inspect the /home directory (where Flatpak packages are typically stored):

du -sh /home/zenzen/.var 2>/dev/null | sort -h
4

I need to learn to read good.

I missed that piece...

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5

Unfortunately my Windows' troubleshooting skills have rusted away over the last few years... I don't miss them :smiley:

But I think it's unlikely this is an issue with the virtualization software. Unless it's writing logs constantly for some reason?

6

I ran these commands on my PC, as I felt it was a really good idea, to clean things up.

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7

Thank you very much for your replies. The VM is running under Virtualbox. I'll run the suggested commands this weekend and see if I can free up some disk space. Snaps, snapd services and gnome software snap plugin are completely removed/disabled and there are no own flatpak packages installed, only the preinstalled Zorin flatpak themes.
When it doesn't help maybe I make a fresh install of Windows or remove the VM and Virtualbox.

8

Health Warning! Important to read the output of this command and check that items listed for removal are as expected and not critical files... just saying. Zab

9

"sudo apt clean && sudo apt autoremove"
only showed one package: libsnapd-glib-2-1, which I then removed, freeing up 391 kb of disk space. That's not really much. When executing zenzen's commands, no unusually high storage usage was detected. So it is probably not the VM that causes the troubles.

10

After I used disk cleaner in Windows once again and cleaned up old system files and recoverypoints, there are suddenly 80 GiB of 160 GiB free space shown. That is the storage consumption I expected. So it seems to be okay for now.

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