Question

"No space left on device" on mounted volume

I have a Ubuntu 18.04 droplet running some docker containers. I added a single volume, and after “some amount of time” (as yet unknown) I get “No space left on device” trying to write to it.

if I cd to the mount point and do a ‘touch’ I get the same message. rebooting the droplet makes it work again.

fstab is: /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_dockervol2 /mnt/dockervol2 ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0

anyone come across something similar?


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KFSys
Site Moderator
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June 27, 2022

Hi @neil2609d7b023c26027079ecc,

It does seems like you don’t have enough space on your Volume. You can check that by typing:

  1. df -h

The output would look something like this:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev
tmpfs           395M  1.8M  393M   1% /run
/dev/vda1        25G   20G  4.4G  82% /

In my case I am using 20G out of 25GB available for my root partition. Basically, the df command reports the file system disk space usage.

  • Also if you have enough space, make sure to check your Inode usage:
df -i
  • Then depending on the partition which is filling up you could use the following command to find any files that are larger than 500MB for example:
sudo find / -type f -size +500M -exec ls -lh {} \;

Depending on the size of your disk, the command might take a while to complete. You can then go ahead and delete any of the large files that you do not need.

  • If there are no large files maybe there are a lot of small files which are exhausting the available webspace, what you could do is use the du command which estimates the file space usage:
du -h --max-depth=1 /

For example:

root@test-droplet:~$ cd /home/
root@test-droplet:/home$ du -h --max-depth=1
16K ./testuser
28K ./user
16K ./root
1.8G ./user2
5.0G ./test-droplet
7.1G .

Then we can cd into the largest folder and run the command again:

root@test-droplet:/home$ cd test-droplet/
root@test-droplet:/home/test-droplet$ du -h --max-depth=1
76K ./.npm
4.0K ./script
5.0G ./public_html
12K ./.ssh
5.0G .

We would need to do that a few more times until we get to the folder that is using those 5GB.

Note: if you have a database service like MySQL, make sure Not to delete any files manually from the MySQL folder. This would cause issues with your database.

If you are unable to clear any disk space I would recommend upgrading your Droplet.

Lastly, I believe in your case it can be due to high inode usage so do not forget to check the df -i command.

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