Question

"No space left on device" on mounted volume

Hi, i try to move my data to newely attached volume of 30 GB.

and fails with a following message:

cp: cannot create regular file '/mnt/volume_fra1_01/data/2_alkis/cache/15/17242/10813.pbf': No space left on device
cp: cannot create directory '/mnt/volume_fra1_01/data/tmp': No space left on device
...

when i check an available space there is still 20GB free on a volume

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            97M 1020K   96M   2% /run
/dev/vda1        25G   21G  3.2G  87% /
tmpfs           485M     0  485M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/vda15      105M  5.3M  100M   5% /boot/efi
tmpfs            97M  4.0K   97M   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda         30G   11G   19G  36% /mnt/volume_fra1_01

is it a bug or a feature?

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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December 15, 2022
Accepted Answer

Hi there,

It is possible that you’ve filled up your inodes rather than the disk space itself. You can check if this is the case with the following command:

df -i

This usually happens when there are a lot of small files and it is the number of files that causes the problem rather than the size.

If this is the case, use the following command to find the directory that contains most of those files:

sudo find / -type f -size +500M -exec ls -lh {} \;

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

Bobby Source

In my case, I hadn’t expanded the size of my volume as explained in this article: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/volumes/how-to/increase-size/#expand-the-filesystem

After following the steps I was able to unlock all of the space in my mounted volume.

Hi @Bobby tnx for a feedback, but i already removed this volume and attached a new one with +5G above the previous one. and it just worked.

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