Last modified: December 2, 2022

Overview

This document provides steps to help you to manage your server’s hard drive space.

Examine disk space usage

To examine your system’s disk space usage, run the following command:

df -h

The output will resemble the following example:

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Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/LogVol00  288G  189G   85G  70% /
/dev/sda1              99M   47M   48M  50% /boot
tmpfs                 252M     0  252M   0% /dev/shm
/usr/tmpDSK           485M   11M  449M   3% /tmp

This output indicates that the system’s main storage device (/dev/mapper/LogVol00) in the root (/) directory uses 70% of its available disk space and contains 85 GB of free space.

Examine disk space usage by file and directory

If your system currently uses too much disk space, perform the following steps to identify files to delete:

1. To determine which files and directories consume most of your hard drive space, run the du command. The output will resemble the following example:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

   372K ~ 107M etc 113 G home 253M lib 20K LICENSE 2.6M locale 16K lost+found 64K mbox_backup 8.0K media 8.0K mnt 418M opt 0 proc 12M pub 4.0K pub-htaccess.txt 648K templates 14K tmp 64K tools 5.4G /var

   Note:

   • We recommend that you only run this command in off-peak hours to prevent additional load on your server.
   • The numbers in the left column represent the sizes of the files and directories that the working directory contains, in human-readable format.
   In this example, the /home directory, which generally contains the system’s cPanel account data, uses the most disk space (113 GB). Because in most cases you cannot delete your users’ data, examine the second largest directory (the /var directory) for disk usage data.

2. To examine the desired directory, run the following command:

   du -sh /var/*

   The output will resemble the following example:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

   12K /var/account 4.0K /var/aptitude 28K /var/aquota.user 938M /var/cache 559M /var/cpanel 4.0K /var/cvs 24K /var/db 32K /var/empty 8.0K /var/games 173M /var/lib 8.0K /var/local 36K /var/lock 3.7G /var/log 0 /var/mail 10M /var/named 8.0K /var/nis 8.0K /var/opt 44K /var/portsentry 8.0K /var/preserve 144K /var/profiles 16K /var/proftpd 16K /var/proftpd.delay 4.0K /var/proftpd.pid 4.0K /var/proftpd.scoreboard 8.0K /var/quota.user 8.0K /var/racoon 1.2M /var/run 16M /var/spool 4.0K /var/state 14K /var/tmp 4.0K /var/vzquota 44K /var/www 20K /var/yp

   This output indicates that the `/var/logs/` directory uses the most disk space.

3. Repeat this process until you locate files that you wish to remove.

4. To delete the desired files, run the following command, where filename represents the file to remove:

   rm -f filename

   Warning:

   Exercise caution when you run the rm utility. You cannot recover files or directories that you delete.

Retain log entries

Log files often use a large amount of disk space. To retain the system’s most recent log file entries when you remove excess log files, perform the following steps:

1. If you have not already located the specific files to remove from this directory, run the du command.
2. Examine the command’s output to determine the files to delete.
3. For each file, run the following commands, where filename represents the file’s name.

   tail -5000 filename > filename.new
   mv filename.new filename
   sync

4. To release the file lock, restart the service that created the file.

SMART errors

To disable SMART errors, run the following commands:

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touch /var/cpanel/disablesmartcheck
/scripts/upcp

Monitor disk space usage

To monitor disk space usage, enable the System disk space usage warnings setting in WHM’s Tweak Settings interface (WHM » Home » Server Configruation » Tweak Settings).