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Last night I had about 190GB of free space on my 500GB HDD. Today I have about 80GB free. I ran df and discovered that my /home/jon/.Private folder is currently using 80% of my hard drive.

What. The. Hell.

I really don't need to encrypt my files that bad. Can anyone tell me why I've lost so much space to this, and what I can do to recover as much free space as possible?

I realize that I'm not going to get back 330-something odd GB of space, but I lost 100GB overnight. I'm new enough to Ubuntu (and Linux in general) that I don't want to proceed without a firm understanding of what's going on here.

Thanks in advance, guys.

newuser
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2 Answers2

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Since its contents are encrypted, you are unlikely to be able to tell much by looking at the files in ~/.Private directly.

Instead, you'd be better off looking at the unencrypted view of those same files in ~/Private. The ecryptfs system has quite a low overhead, so if ~/.Private is large it is likely because you've placed a lot of data in ~/Private (or a program running on your behalf has done so).

James Henstridge
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2

I just went through a similar situation on Ubuntu 16.04. Not having ever set up the ~/Private folder, but with the ~/.Private folder taking up 90% of disk space available. In my case I had enabled the /home folder encryption option during install; it seems that in such case the ~/.Private folder is set up automatically for the purpose. You can verify it, if the ~/.Private folder is a link to /home/.encryptfs this is most likely the case:

$ ll ~/.Private
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user user 33 nov  1 16:25 /home/user/.Private -> /home/.ecryptfs/user/.Private/

I do not know exactly what causes this expansion of the encrypted file system, but it is basically the ~/.Trash folder. I just needed to empty the Trash in the DE to bring things back to normal. I suspect that when single files are removed from the Trash they somehow remain in the encrypted file system; emptying the Trash fixes this.

Note that it may take several minutes for the system to report the correct space usage after the Trash is emptied.

Luís de Sousa
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