Question

Out of disk space too early

  • Posted on September 8, 2014
  • jimcAsked by jimc

My hard disk space has been gobbled up without me really installing much if anything. I had backups enabled and I disabled it before deleting the backups. Could they be sucking up all my disk space? I looked in my log directory and nothing in there is very big. I’ve done apt-get clean, auto clean, etc.

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Andrew SB • September 8, 2014

logrotate is the utility that automatically compresses old log files. You can also configure it to delete older logs. Edit the file /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 It will look like:

/var/log/apache2/*.log {
        weekly
        missingok
        rotate 52
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty
        create 640 root adm
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
                if /etc/init.d/apache2 status > /dev/null ; then \
                    /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null; \
                fi;
        endscript
        prerotate
                if [ -d /etc/logrotate.d/httpd-prerotate ]; then \
                        run-parts /etc/logrotate.d/httpd-prerotate; \
                fi; \
        endscript
}

Add maxage 14 to delete logs older than two weeks.

Mark Findlay • September 8, 2014

Issue the command below to see what folder is using up most space

du -sh /*

That should give a summary of what folder is the largest. It won’t be an instant result, give the command time to run.

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