File system root low disk space

Question

I installed Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 a month back. It all worked perfectly but after two days I repeatedly got the notification

File system root low disk space 0 MB left.

I had installed everything correctly, with root space 21 GB. However, I reinstalled Ubuntu to get rid of this, this time with root as 100 GB. It all worked fine for 20 days. But today I started getting the notification again. File system root low disk space- 1 GB left.

I can't find how to resolve this issue. Why is root filling up so fast? Wherever I read, it says 15-20 GB is enough, but even 100GB is apparently not sufficient in my case!

Solution 1

You can run command in terminal:

sudo du -hs /*  

And check which folder takes the most.

Solution 2

I've faced the same problem and when i run df -h

I found that /boot using 100% of it's space and that mainly because of i didn't remove old kernel versions!

To know your current Kernel version run uname -r and to check all installed kernel versions run dpkg --list 'linux-image*'

i have found a lot of kernel versions installed and that's why there was no space in my /boot directory! and thus i can't even install new updates from Software Updater.

You can remove kernel versions run sudo apt-get remove linux-image-VERSION

But By careful not to remove your current kernel version.

You can also Install Ubuntu Tweak and using it you can remove all your old kernel versions.

To install Ubuntu Tweak you can run the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak

To Open it simply type: ubuntu-tweak or ubuntu-tweak -f janitor To open janitor tab directly.

Here's all "askubuntu" pages that help you to do this ;) my thread.

What is the safest way to clean up /boot partition?

Is it safe to remove old kernels after installing the latest mainline?

How to run Ubuntu Tweak's janitor automatically?

This solution works with me :D

Comments

[JoKeR]

please add to your question outputs: df -h and sudo parted -l

[user2946079]

I did that. Apparently, there's a folder log in the var folder in the root directory. It's taking up all of the data.(>99%). What to do now?

[Zabuldon]

check which logs is too big. When you determine which logs growing, we can continue and fix main issue which caused logs growing

[user2946079]

Ok did that.There are two files- kern.log and syslog.1 . Both take exactly 50-50% of the total log folder space.

[Zeiss Ikon]

Old kernels and unneeded packages aren't going to take up 70 GB in three weeks, even if you install a year's worth of updates on installation. This would typically account for < 1 GB on a system that's had a year of updates.

[Zabuldon]

Can you pack it and upload to anywhere? I want to check.

[Mr.Gosh]

thats why i mentioned full encrypted systems... - there this is totally different