[Solved] My ArchLabs hdd is full

#1

Hi all,
This just came up. I tried to upgrade my Brave Browser and the system says my hdd is full and it does not have enough memory to perform the operation. So, I backed up my home folder and other personal files into another hdd. I will probably do a clean install of ArchLabs. Are there any other files that I need to save? Thanks.

p.s. This was my first attempt with Arch Linux. I installed ArchLabs to an old Western Digital Raptor HDD during the 1st quarter of 2019. It has only a 70 GB storage capacity. So far, ArchLabs Linux has been very stable. I am very surprised for I kept hearing how Arch will break your system. Great work all.

#2

How are you updating brave and what package do you have installed (brave-bin or just brave)?

Seems an issue with baph build directory being located in /tmp (ram) and running out of space.

#3

you might need to figure ouw WHY your HDD is full, so this doesn’t happen to you again.
What happens if you run this command to dump the contents of your /tmp file?

sudo find /tmp -type f -atime +10 -delete

Does this free up some drive space?

1 Like
#4

Maybe you need to cleanup some locations ArchWiki cleaning the package cache…

#5

Thanks for your prompt response. I use “yay” to update my brave-bin. Up until yesterday, every other program would update as usual except Brave, now I get a notice that my partition is full and no updates were performed.

#6

Thanks ColsonP2, I will try and report back.

#7

Thanks for the link, I will study the instructions as per the wiki. Best regards.

#8

I got the following from the terminal after follow your instruction then doing a sudo pacman -Syu.

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
error: Partition / too full: 52266 blocks needed, 11528 blocks free
error: failed to commit transaction (not enough free disk space)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

#9

=> finished: 879 packages removed (disk space saved: 10.18 GiB)

Wow. Just did a “sudo paccache -r” per your link to the wiki and saved 10.18 GiB.

When I first learned about ArchLabs or Arch Linux in Jan. 2019, I did a manual partition install and set aside 8 GiB for the swap partition. Upon monitoring htop, I never see anything used in the swap. Perhaps I could shrink this partition down to 2 or even 1 Gib and recover even more disk space. What do you think?

#10

@jsluk
You have two good paper about this and it depends system recommandation and you use:
First the Archwiki(https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap)
Second Rules for different system and why Swap Size

For example i have 6Go RAM and i don’t have swap space because i don’t use hybernation and i don’t open multiple application same time: 4 maximum and all is fine :wink:

#11

Thanks Naltap. base on your suggestion, it is probably OK for me to completely erase my swap partition. I have 16 Gib of ram and this is a desktop PC. So, I probably will not need hibernate either. Do you agree?

#12

@jsluk, i think so but it depends what you do with your desktop and how your work.
But yes, if you don’t open a lot of application same time or don’t mount or build video or other things.
I hope that will help you.

#13

With 16G ram you’d have to open a lot of applications to have issues. I have the same amount of memory and I don’t use swap, I regularly have 20+ browser tabs open, numerous terminals, and the occasional VM with 4G memory allocated. Never had a memory shortage.

#14

If you remove the swap partition then it might be best to install earlyoom, just in case™ — Linux handles out-of-memory events pretty badly.

#15

Thanks natemaia and Head_on_a_Stick, I will study your suggestions. Best regards.