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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!

Codemonkey
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  • Did your log files get rotated, then compressed? – toppledwagon Aug 06 '21 at 20:04
  • Nope, my weekly access_log is only 3GB or so. – Codemonkey Aug 06 '21 at 20:15
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    Without more information, this is impossible to answer. You include no information about workloads, temporary files and so forth. – vidarlo Aug 06 '21 at 20:41
  • 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... – Codemonkey Aug 06 '21 at 22:06
  • 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. – berndbausch Aug 07 '21 at 02:14

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