this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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OK, one possibility I can think of. At some point, files may have been created where there is currently a mount point which is hiding folders that are still there, on the root partition.
You can remount just the root partition elsewhere by doing something like
Then use du or similar to see if the numbers more closely resemble the values seen in df. I'm not sure if that graphical tool you used that views the filesystem can see those files hidden this way. So, it's probably worth checking just to rule it out.
Anyway, if you see bigger numbers in /mnt/rootonly, then check the mount points (like /mnt/rootonly/home and /mnt/rootonly/boot/efi). They should be empty, if not those are likely files/folders that are being hidden by the mounts.
When finished you can unmount the bound folder with
umount /mnt/rootonly
Just an idea that might be worth checking.
This! Thank you, this allowed me to find the culprit! It turns out I had an external disk failure some weeks ago, and a cron rsync job was writing in /mnt/thatdrive. When the externaldrive died rsync created a folder /mnt/thatdrive. Now that I replaced the drive, /mnt was disregarded by the disk analyser, but the folder was still there and indeed hidden by the mount... It is just a coincidence that it was half the size of /
SOLVED!
Aha, glad to hear it.