gorged harddrive

[Ed Greshko]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 20:50 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
>> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 10:57 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
>>>> charles f. zeitler wrote:
>>>>> --- Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko at greshko.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> charles f. zeitler wrote:
>>>>>>> i've been pruning my "downloads" disk,
>>>>>>> rather drastically, and not making a dent.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> today some more, less drastic but still
>>>>>>> hefty, same result.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> revisited du- checked it twice - three
>>>>>>> times- yup, it reports one directory at
>>>>>>> 800+ gb- on a 400gb disk!
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> fsck (forced) failed to report any problems,
>>>>>>> there don't seem to be any symlinks,
>>>>>>> and the sub-direcory sizes are sane...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> any ideas welcome, and appreciated.
>>>>>> Instead of telling people what you are seeing it would be better to show the 
>>>>>> actual commands and output.
>>>>>>
>>>>> good point.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> [fedora_8 at Nyarlethotep ~]$ df
>>>>> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
>>>>> /dev/sda8             13250836  11459264   1107608  92% /
>>>>> /dev/sda9              1898468    825572    974904  46% /tmp
>>>>> /dev/sda11           270882768 259964688   5414052  98% /home
>>>>> /dev/sda10             1898468   1156484    643992  65% /var
>>>>> /dev/sdc1            480719056 370452080 105383136  78% /home/fedora_8/music_vids
>>>>> /dev/sda2               101105     17986     77898  19% /boot
>>>>> tmpfs                  1037552       248   1037304   1% /dev/shm
>>>>> /dev/sdb1            384578164 330445976  34596748  91% /home/fedora_8/torrents_isos
>>>>>
>>>>> /dev/sdb1 is the drive under discussion.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> [fedora_8 at Nyarlethotep ~]$ du -sb t*s/*
>>>>> 34256010522     torrents_isos/backup
>>>>> 883393808812    torrents_isos/data
>>>>> 58352749159     torrents_isos/finished
>>>>> 75197043648     torrents_isos/finnished
>>>>> 18222558607     torrents_isos/isos
>>>>> 4781438 torrents_isos/logs
>>>>> 16384   torrents_isos/lost+found
>>>>> 4096    torrents_isos/lost_meta
>>>>> 193903286       torrents_isos/meta
>>>>> 1402434610      torrents_isos/new
>>>>> 75585799469     torrents_isos/porn
>>>>> 4096    torrents_isos/rar
>>>>> 1318803 torrents_isos/shas
>>>>> 4096    torrents_isos/tmp
>>>>> 97996487        torrents_isos/total_meta.tar.bz2
>>>>> 4096    torrents_isos/zip
>>>>>
>>>>> somethings wrong with t*s/data  ....
>>>>>
>>>> OK....  I believe I know what the problem is.  The torrents_isos/porn 
>>>> directory makes things seem larger than what they really are....
>>>>
>>>> No, just kidding.....
>>>>
>>>> I believe you may have a bunch of non-completed torrent downloads.  When you 
>>>> start a torrent download the client will reserve the space and it will be 
>>>> reflected in the output of "du" but *not* in the output of "df".  Thus with 
>>>> "du" you can have a situation where it "thinks" more disk space is being 
>>>> used than it actually is.  FWIW, this is normal.
>>> No.
>> What do you mean "no"?
>>
>> When starting the download of a torrent the output of "du" shows the disk 
>> space has been used.  But, in reality, it hasn't.  df reflects that is 
>> hasn't been actually used.
> 
> There are two scenarios, according to whether your torrent client
> preallocates space or not. I use Ktorrent, which can be set to do
> either. In the default case, no preallocation is done. After starting a
> torrent an 'ls -l' of the file shows its full size, but a 'du' shows
> only what has actually been downloaded. I checked this before my
> previous post and I just checked it again to be sure.
> 
> If preallocation is on then of course 'du' will show the allocated
> space, but 'df' will account for it. I also checked this BTW. The
> numbers add up.
> 
> In other words 'df' and 'du' are mutually consistent.

While it may be the case on your system, it isn't on mine and apparently 
isn't on the OP's.  And if you use azureus on your system you could prove it 
to yourself too.