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I've been trying to free up disc space in my Ubuntu 22.04 install.

I've been using a disc analyzer tool similar to windirstat but for Ubuntu (QDirStat) which shows up a total used space of around ~60gb while the File system tab in System Monitor shows up a total used space of ~90gb.

How can I find which one is right and/or what is using the missing ~30gb of used space?

EDIT: More specs:

Below is the du -h output.

du -h

Running sudo lsof +L1 outputs a bunch of files but I ran a command that summed up the used space by lsof's and it's about 350MB only.

Also this is a VM running on VMWare Workstation if that matters.

Difference between different HD space analyzers and System monitor:

enter image description here

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  • What does du show? What filesystem are we talking about? Is it one partition? Many? What is the output of df -h? Please edit your question and add more detail. Commented Jun 24, 2024 at 13:32
  • Make sure lsof is installed, then run sudo lsof +L1 to see if your system has deleted files that are still held open by running processes. Those files no longer have any name in directory listings, but they won't actually get removed from disk until the process(es) holding them open either close them or exit. Commented Jun 24, 2024 at 13:43
  • Thank you both for your suggestions. I've updated the main post with answers to all your questions. Commented Jun 24, 2024 at 21:37
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    Good first question. But in the future, any text that can be copy/pasted into your question is more useul to expert users who may want to use their browser's search feature to check for specific text in what you have posted. Realize that the guis still have to be images, so only a minor comment here. Commented Jun 25, 2024 at 0:18

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First, start QDirStat with root privileges: It literally tells you ">54 GB", i.e. more than that value, because you didn't have permission to see all subdirectories. This is what it tells you in that message panel between the tree view and the treemap graphics.

Also, most disk utilities (including QDirStat) use 1024-based units while some use 1000-based ones. The Baobab Disk Usage Analyzer is one of them IIRC.

QDirStat can show you the exact byte size if you right-click on a size in the tree view or the side panel.

See also

Stefan Hundhammer (HuHa)

QDirStat author

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  • Thanks. I'm going to mark this as the valid answer because running QDirStat with root priviledges definitely helped me identify where the missing space was (it seems I have around 30gb of Docker orphan files laying around). This was in a folder that previously showed much less used space so I overlooked it. Commented Jun 26, 2024 at 12:54

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