Cannot find what is filling up disk space /dev/vda1 is 100% full

Another option that might help you find out what is using up space is ncdu Install it with:

sudo apt-get install ncdu

If you still can’t find anything, try running:

lsof / | grep deleted

Sometimes if a file is deleted while it is opened by a process, it will not actually free up the disk space until the process is ended. This command will show if there are any files in that state.

outside of other answers here what I did was:

navigate through subfolders with ncdu and finding large folders. Among them one can delete:

/var/logs https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=158510 // /var/logs/journal http://askubuntu.com/questions/100004/how-can-i-free-space-from-a-massive-39-5gb-var-log-folder // other already archived (GZ-ipped) files;

and compress .git folders of projects by shrinking them with this command: git repack -a -d --depth=250 --window=250 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5613345/how-to-shrink-the-git-folder

Googled and found this question which had the same problem.

@TonyTsang That command helped me find what it was

Apparently it was a hidden log folder set by pm2.

You can run the following to see what is eating up your space from /

sudo du -ah --max-depth=1 -x

This will list out all the directories and files along with its size for current directory. feel free to increase --max-depth=N

if u didn’t get any directory that is using much space and still /dev/vda1 showing nearly occupied try re starting the server with these command “shutdown -r now” these solved my problem. :)

I had the exact same issue. I am running a laravel app on a linux instance. The app performs a lot of DB queries and I found that the mysql binlogs were eating up the disk space - almost 1GB each.

To fix:

SSH onto the server cd back to the root directory run sudo du -h --max-depth=1 -x to show which directory is consuming space cd down to var/lib/mysql run PURGE BINARY LOGS TO 'mysql-bin.000100';

That will clear out the bin logs. If you want a longer term solution, consider only retaining a few days of logs as explained here

How I solved it:

1. Use Filezilla, search for file, Filesize greater “100000000” (shows files larger than 100 MB).
2. Found the file ibtmp1 with 48 GB.
3. Solved it with: ibtmp1 https://stackoverflow.com/q/41216630/1066234 and https://www.rmtweb.co.uk/mysql-ibtmp1-file-grows-exponentially

Hope that helps.

I found a number of log files that I think (although I’m not sure 100%) that I can delete. But how do I do this? What is the command to clear all log files in a certain directory Or what is the command to delete a single file? And what is the command to download that specific file should I want to because I’m not 100% sure I can delete it.

thanks!

Its usually because log file If you’re looking for large files… Here (run as root). This will give you your top 40 biggest files:

find / -type f  -size +10000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{print $5 ": " $9}' | sort -nr | head -n 40

Source: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2262783

I have experienced it too. After upgrading to Windows 10, disk space always goes to 100%, I thought its because of the printer, I also took advice from HP Printer Support, but it still persists.