Score:0

Why did I suddenly gain 300GB on my server

ml flag

I've been working on my server all day, doing various things. I know, unquestioningly (found the evidence by scrolling up in one of my terminal sessions) that I had about 900GB of space 4 hours ago. It's been about that the last few days.

Now, I've noticed it's 1200GB.

I'm as certain as I can be that I've not accidentally (or intentionally) deleted 300GB of files. But I'm scared.

Is there a rational explanation?

CentOS8, 4TB raid 1 NVME ext4 partition.

Thank you!

es flag
Did your log files get rotated, then compressed?
Codemonkey avatar
ml flag
Nope, my weekly access_log is only 3GB or so.
vidarlo avatar
ar flag
Without more information, this is impossible to answer. You include no information about workloads, temporary files and so forth.
Codemonkey avatar
ml flag
Agreed. Web and database server, nginx, php, mariadb. 2GB database size. 2.5TB of JPEG files, and I don't think any of them have suddenly disappeared...
berndbausch avatar
us flag
The rational explanation is that many processes use this computer. One scenario is a large unlinked file (i.e. a file without directory entry) is in use by some process, and is automatically removed when that process exits. You can't see that file with tools like `du` or `ls`, since it has no name. Tools like `lsof` can help you analyze such situations while such files exist, but after the fact, I would not know how confirm this scenario.
mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.