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  • hello, welcome to unix.se. You should have a look at the answer here : unix.stackexchange.com/a/68532/27616 ( few things to try, starting with lsof -nP +L1 and various variant (linux and not linux)) Commented Oct 29, 2021 at 12:28
  • Thank you, but, unfortunately lsof -nP +L1 does not give me anything relevant :( - the solutions on that page takes me to 2 usages - journal and pulseuadio, both having a size measured in MB - nothing pops up for GB level usages :( Commented Oct 29, 2021 at 12:49
  • maybe check if you don't have "zillions" of small files : each file takes a ("small") amount of disk (usually because it occupies at least an inode, which size varies depending on the file size and the filesystem). it can add up... and "df" will show the disk space occupied (full inode space coounted), whereas "du" will show the added file sizes (just the cotent of the files, not the space the inode containing this data occupies). Commented Oct 29, 2021 at 13:28
  • another possibility: it could lie "underneath" a mounted filesystem (/tmp ? for exemple) You can, in linux, remount "/" (using a free loop device) as read-only somewhere (say: /mnt/readonlyroot/), and browse that using du -hs /mnt/readonlyroot, and compare to du -hxs / # -x prevents du to descend to another filesystem mounted underneath "/", such as "/tmp") Commented Oct 29, 2021 at 13:36
  • (and I don"t understand "Computing this it gives somewhere around ~14GB of used disk space." : the df you show shows 27gb in /, not 14. you maybe compared it to a "du -hxs /" output, that amounts to 14gb?) Commented Oct 29, 2021 at 13:39