Ubuntu 22.10; AMD 64-bit; 6 core; 1 TB HDD
Somehow I got one of those run away 'fill the HDD' problems. I didn't even know I had that until I got an error message on screen that the HDD would soon be filled. And sure enough, before I could figure out how to stop it, it was full and I couldn't do anything. Rebooted it several times, but it would hang before the log in splash screen and eventually wouldn't even boot.
Spent hours trying to find the right words to say online to convey the issue and try to find some help, but without success. Made several attempts to make a backup of important recently changed files but kept being blocked by the 'no room' issue.
Eventually, I pulled out the handy Boot Repair USB stick and ran that. Even that said there wasn't any room for it to operate. Attempted deleting some folders to give more room but the drop downs only said 'Move to trash' but doesn't offer delete. I tried doing that anyway. Still, afterwards, Boot Repair reported not enough room to run the repair.
Gave up, rebooted, ran boot repair again, and this time it said it had completed the repairs, I have no idea how. The drive finally booted from BIOS, even showed the Grub menu. Eventually I was back to the desktop. When I checked gparted it was back to 500 GB of unused space (on a 1 TB HDD).
Spent 12 hours working on this issue over two days. Very frustrating. Biggest problem was that there wasn't/isn't a thread where this apparent issue I guess caused by some software still running and filling up the drive with log or error messages is written up, recently. Most similar problems I saw were many years old and didn't apply to my situation.
Sorry for the wall of text...I'd like to ask if anyone has a link to a recent article that covers this issue. Example: What to do when a Linux HDD suddenly starts to fill up by itself. Or how to set Ubuntu to only fill up so much and then auto-stop? Or if anyone knows what caused it, and the trick of stopping it while it's ongoing before it's a crisis?
Thanks.