Available Disk Space

John Mc Murray

10/2/23, 7:03 AM

I have an ubuntu server with 2x 4Tb hard drives. This was set up with Hetzner's install image using software RAID 1.

I'm confused by the output of df -h. It lists 1.9T available for / and 1.6T for /home.

What confuses me is that /home is a sub-directory of /, so does this mean that the total available space here is 1.9T, or does it mean that the total space available is 3.5T of which 1.6T is allocated specifically to /home and 1.9T to the other stuff in / (ie, I could put 1.6T data in /home and a further 1.9T is /tmp for instance)?

Output of df -h

udev             16G     0   16G   0% /dev
tmpfs           3.2G  880K  3.2G   1% /run
/dev/md2        2.0T  1.6G  1.9T   1% /
tmpfs            16G     0   16G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            16G     0   16G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/md1        989M   94M  845M  10% /boot
/dev/md3        1.7T   28K  1.6T   1% /home
tmpfs           3.2G     0  3.2G   0% /run/user/0

0 + 0

linux

hard-drive

Score:1

Server

Martin

10/2/23, 7:41 AM

You obviously do not know what a mount point is, and how filesystems in the unix / linux world are working. You should definately read about it, otherwise you will be lost administrating your server...

Short story: Opposed to the windows world, where you have drive letters (C:, D:, etc), in linux all partitions sum up in ONE directory tree - your root ( / ). The rootfs must be mounted at boot time, all other file system can be mounted later (but do not have to). The data of those filesystems are saved in respect to where you are: All data below /home is stored in /dev/md1 (In your case). In the root filesystem, only the empty mount point ( /home ) is stored, everything else is stored inside the mounted device.

In your case this means: you have 2.0 TB available for your system data, and additional 1.7 TB available for your users home directories.

0 + 0

Gerald Schneider

10/2/23, 7:46 AM

It's not `one filesystem`. It's one directory tree that can contain many filesystems.

Martin

10/2/23, 7:48 AM

you are correct of course, thank you for the hint!

John Mc Murray

10/2/23, 8:48 AM

@Martin thank you... I wasn't quite clicking how it worked, but now that you've explained it I get it... Its the same as mounting a USB stick for example where in terms of directory structure is a sub-directory of root, but a completely different FS... Thanks for clearing it up

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Available Disk Space

TH: พื้นที่ว่างในดิสก์ที่มีอยู่

RO: Spațiu disponibil pe disc

RU: Доступное место на диске

VI: Dung lượng đĩa khả dụng

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