Having trouble tracking down what's filling up my root partition

[alan-arthur]

Ubuntu Version:
24.04.2 LTS

Problem Description:
My root partition is full and I can’t track down what’s filling it up. It’s a 1TB partition, which until yesterday was mostly free, but it’s filled up all of a sudden. Using

sudo du -hs * | sort -rh | head -n 10

I get

791G    home
26G     backups
8.4G    snap
7.4G    usr
3.4G    opt
273M    boot
144M    docker
97M     root
30M     timeshift

OK, I can see that there’s an excessive amount in my home folder. Running the same command in home gets me

791G    alan
28M     sabnzbd
20K     plex
16K     calibre

OK, so it’s all in my own user folder, but when I run the same command in that folder, it doesn’t show any large sub-folders at all.

795M    lib
195M    git
22M     snap
13M     docker
4.8M    homarr
64K     filebrowser.db
64K     certificates
16K     bin
4.0K    Videos
4.0K    Templates

There’s no large files in the folder, so I’m at a bit of a loss.

Any suggestions?

[ogra]

@alan-arthur

du -hs * | sort -rh | head -n 10

add a dot here (and no need for sudo in your home):

du -hs .* | sort -rh | head -n 10

That should list the hidden dirs your other command suppresses …

[alan-arthur]

Fantastic! Thanks very much. That’s nailed it down, docker.raw is the culprit. Now to figure out why!