bbaceb5f4a80 2 months ago 214MB
```
Apparently “none” indicates a dangling or intermediate image: [Why the “none” image appears in Docker and how can we avoid it - Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53221412/why-the-none-image-appears-in-docker-and-how-can-we-avoid-it) – but it’s so small I don’t think it’s my first priority.
When advice at [Is it safe to clean docker/overlay2/ - Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46672001/is-it-safe-to-clean-docker-overlay2/70527862#70527862) gets into grepping overlays against images, I lose steam. There are 60 hashed folders in my docker/overlay2… please don’t make me grep 120 times…
I imagine my options at this point are:
A. Get some help figuring out if either of these overlays can be deleted.
B. Restore from a snapshot, upgrade for more disk space and try again. Will I always have these huge overlays?
(And how do I even have 3 x 18G files on a 25G instance..?)
If anyone’s up at this hour and has any input, I’d appreciate it.
---
### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2023, 9:29am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/upgrade-failed-low-disk-space-excess-overlay-files/287048/2 "2023-11-30T09:29:22Z")
Just to tick off the basics, but you have tried `./launcher cleanup` and this is what’s left after?
---
### Author:  [@ToddZ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ToddZ)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2023, 9:52am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/upgrade-failed-low-disk-space-excess-overlay-files/287048/3 "2023-11-30T09:52:08Z")
Yes - cleanup had no effect.
---
### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2023, 10:09am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/upgrade-failed-low-disk-space-excess-overlay-files/287048/4 "2023-11-30T10:09:34Z")
> [@ToddZ](#):
>
> Apparently because of two 18G “overlay” files:
You don’t have two 18GB overlay files, that’s a red herring. Docker uses overlayfs and those are just how your existing disk is presented to the container. `/dev/vda2` is your disk and is mounted at `/` - that’s where you should be directing your efforts.
If `./launcher cleanup` did nothing then I’m assuming `docker image prune` (removes dangling images) won’t either. If you’re only using this server for discourse you may need to just check around to make sure there are no large files/folders in your home directory.
---
### Author:  [@ToddZ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ToddZ)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2023, 10:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/upgrade-failed-low-disk-space-excess-overlay-files/287048/5 "2023-11-30T10:39:49Z")
Ohh – well, that’s tricky of Docker…
No, prune operations didn’t recover anything.
I’m poking through /usr now with ncdu… nothing looks like it obviously doesn’t belong, though I’m not sure what to make of /usr/lib/modules:
```plaintext
547.2 MiB [###########################] /6.2.0-37-generic
547.2 MiB [##########################] /6.2.0-34-generic
1.2 MiB [] /6.2.0-33-generic
1.2 MiB [] /6.2.0-32-generic
1.2 MiB [] /6.2.0-35-generic
1.2 MiB [] /6.2.0-36-generic
```
By far the most use is reported as the overlays down in /var:
```plaintext
16.0 GiB [###########################] /var
4.3 GiB [#######] /usr
2.3 GiB [###] swapfile
1.7 GiB [##] /snap
289.5 MiB [] /boot
```
There’s nothing in /snap but what it came with:
```plaintext
root@forum:/# snap list
Name Version Rev Tracking Publisher Notes
core22 20230801 864 latest/stable canonical✓ base
lxd 5.19-8635f82 26200 latest/stable/… canonical✓ -
snapd 2.60.4 20290 latest/stable canonical✓ snapd
```
Whoa – /var/log/journal got big!
```plaintext
1.8 GiB [###########################] /7341e5ac94ae440bbd06f743e242da89
16.0 MiB [] /7025a9ae870140c1bef8e55211d339dc
```
Looks like it’s been tons of bots trying to log in over just a couple of months.
Seems prudent to retain logs for a while, but this forum is still beta.
Maybe vacuuming that will be enough to get me going again.
---
### Author:  [@ToddZ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ToddZ)
#### Post date: [November 30, 2023, 12:38pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/upgrade-failed-low-disk-space-excess-overlay-files/287048/6 "2023-11-30T12:38:19Z")
Well, that didn’t quite do it, so I upgraded the server to 55G. If those big overlay files are inevitable, I guess there wasn’t really a choice.
A Discourse upgrade just completed, the site appears to be working fine on 3.2.0.beta4-dev. 😅
Thank you @JammyDodger and @Stephen for your attention and input!
---
### Author:  [@dandv](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dandv)
#### Post date: [April 3, 2025, 5:22pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/upgrade-failed-low-disk-space-excess-overlay-files/287048/7 "2025-04-03T17:22:46Z")
I was running out of space on a 50GB Linode VPS.
Below are some space hogs that haven’t been mentioned yet. Some are Discourse-specific, some are general to Linux systems.
1. Run `ll /lib/modules`. I was surprised to see about 15GB of old kernels that `apt autoremove` didn’t care to remove. Claude thinks they were installed in a non-standard way, and generated a safe [removal script](https://claude.site/artifacts/662583a0-d2e1-468d-926b-0c0b50378a5f). It took about an hour but it worked (run at your own risk, of course) and I was able to run `./launcher rebuild` without the `no space left on device` error.
2. The script didn’t delete the corresponding headers in `/usr/src`. For that ChatGPT created [another script](https://chatgpt.com/share/67eec136-1688-8004-b195-e69de55bdb21).
3. About half a gigabyte of space was taken by [useless locales](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hundreds-of-megabytes-of-apparently-duplicate-locale-js-files/360254).
4. Another GB+ was taken by the `/var/lib/docker/overlay2/.../merged/home/discourse/.cache` directory.
Maybe a stupid question, but what exactly do the `merge` and `diff` directories contain? Can one of them be deleted safely at some point?
