Why is the size of my .Private folder so large?
Solution 1
Since its contents are encrypted, you are unlikely to be able to tell much by looking at the files in ~/.Private
directly.
Instead, you'd be better off looking at the unencrypted view of those same files in ~/Private
. The ecryptfs
system has quite a low overhead, so if ~/.Private
is large it is likely because you've placed a lot of data in ~/Private
(or a program running on your behalf has done so).
Solution 2
I just went through a similar situation on Ubuntu 16.04. Not having ever set up the ~/Private
folder, but with the ~/.Private
folder taking up 90% of disk space available. In my case I had enabled the /home
folder encryption option during install; it seems that in such case the ~/.Private
folder is set up automatically for the purpose. You can verify it, if the ~/.Private
folder is a link to /home/.encryptfs
this is most likely the case:
$ ll ~/.Private
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user user 33 nov 1 16:25 /home/user/.Private -> /home/.ecryptfs/user/.Private/
I do not know exactly what causes this expansion of the encrypted file system, but it is basically the ~/.Trash
folder. I just needed to empty the Trash in the DE to bring things back to normal. I suspect that when single files are removed from the Trash they somehow remain in the encrypted file system; emptying the Trash fixes this.
Note that it may take several minutes for the system to report the correct space usage after the Trash is emptied.
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Adi
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Adi almost 2 years
Last night I had about 190GB of free space on my 500GB HDD. Today I have about 80GB free. I ran
df
and discovered that my/home/jon/.Private
folder is currently using 80% of my hard drive.What. The. Hell.
I really don't need to encrypt my files that bad. Can anyone tell me why I've lost so much space to this, and what I can do to recover as much free space as possible?
I realize that I'm not going to get back 330-something odd GB of space, but I lost 100GB overnight. I'm new enough to Ubuntu (and Linux in general) that I don't want to proceed without a firm understanding of what's going on here.
Thanks in advance, guys.
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Adi over 12 yearsI'm currently not using that environment since I noticed that my free space was steadily diminishing so I can't check directly, but I could swear that I don't actually have a ~/Private directory. Is that even possible or am I just missing the obvious?
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Adi over 12 yearsYep, I'm back in Ubuntu and there is no ~/Private. What does that mean?
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James Henstridge over 12 yearsIs it possible that you deleted the
~/Private
directory at some point? That wouldn't have cleared the encrypted files found within. Assuming the key also hasn't been removed, you could try runningmkdir ~/Private
followed byecryptfs-mount-private
in a terminal might be enough to regain access. -
Adi over 12 years
ecryptfs-mount-private
did not restore anything to ~/Private after I created the directory. Usingsudo ecryptfs-mount-private
prompted me for my passphrase. Thankfully (and totally by accident) I remember my passphrase, but after entering it I get an error:fopen: No such file or directory
. -
Hoàng Long over 5 yearsI second this. Emptying the trash clear me 1.5 GB+ of data that is impossible to clear otherwise
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Paul about 4 yearsWhat is the DE?