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What is the difference between droplet space and disk space?

Posted on May 8, 2020

When I SSH to my DO 160gb droplet I see the following information:

  System information as of Fri May  8 14:26:10 UTC 2020

  System load:  0.08                Processes:           181
  Usage of /:   82.7% of 154.90GB   Users logged in:     0
  Memory usage: 43%                 IP address for eth0: 1....
  Swap usage:   1%                  IP address for eth1: 1....
Same information as on my DO dashboard.

But when i use ncdu or du -f at the root, i can see all my website files are using 1.6gb of space. I know my database are almost empty so what is taking all the space? Is it the operating system or something similal used by DO on my droplet?

I try to re-own my 160gb which are used by something else Thank you for help



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Hi there @cryptomarketanalytics,

The operating system itself should not use more than a couple of GB of disk space.

You would need to check your directories in order to find out what exactly is consuming the rest of the disk space. It might be a log file that has grown a lot or a directory holding a lot of small files.

For example, you could use the find command to find any files larger than 500MB or so:

  1. find / -type f -size +500M -exec ls -lh {} \; 2>/dev/null

To check for large directories rather than files, you could use the du command with the following arguments:

  1. du -h --max-depth=1 /

This will give you a list with the larges folders, then depending on the largest one you can run the du command again, let’s say the largest folder is the /var/ folder, then the command would look like this:

  1. du -h --max-depth=1 /var

Then for example, let’s say that then the /var/log is the largest one, your next command would look like this:

  1. du -h --max-depth=1 /var/log

Repeat this until you get to the actual largest folder.

Let me know how it goes! Regards, Bobby

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