# Linux, no space left on device

> How to fix the Linux no space left on device error, using apt-get clean to free space and the ncdu utility to find the folder eating all your disk.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2020-11-05 | Topics: [CLI](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/cli/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/linux-no-space-left-on-device/

I was having some strange problems with a Linux Ubuntu server, so I logged into the server and looked up the Apache error log, in `/var/apache2/error.log`.

It was full of `No space left on device` errors.

😱

"How is it possible??" that was my first thought.

I tried running `df` and yes, the disk was 100% full.

To find what was causing this problem, I cleared up some space using

```sh
sudo apt-get clean
```

and I installed the `ncdu` utility:

```sh
sudo apt-get install ncdu
```

and after running it from `/`, I found out one specific folder was holding 90% of the data.

One of my backup scripts was writing the database logs in there, before sending them to another server, and each one was 80MB. One every day.. you can imagine how all those Gigabytes were filled.

It took a while to fill, almost a year. But it did.

I removed all those files, voilà, Linux server working perfectly again.

End of the story.