I’ve had an Ubuntu 22.04 setup going for around a year, and over that year I’ve had to increase the size of the partition holding my /var folder multiple times. I’m now up to 20GB and again running into problems, mainly installing new apps, because that partition is again nearly full. I’ve used commands sudo apt clean and sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500 to temporarily clear up some space, but it doesn’t take long to fill back up, and gets less effective with time, til I have no choice but to expand the partition again.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it normal to need 20GB+ for var? Is there a way to safely reclaim space I don’t know about?

  • wewbullEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Are you using docker on BTRFS?

    Docker makes use of BTRFS snapshots, but it snapshots the whole volume. That means as other programs delete/rewrite files, the old copies still exist in the snapshot. I’ve ended up putting /var/lib/docker on it’s own filesystem.