How to Fix No Space Left on Device When Disk Shows Free Space

Fixing "No Space Left on Device" When Disk Shows Free Space

Seeing "No space left on device" errors on your Breeze when df shows available space is a common and confusing situation. The culprit is almost always inode exhaustion -- the filesystem has run out of metadata entries even though block storage remains available.

Confirm Inode Exhaustion

df -i

Look for a filesystem showing 100% inode usage. Compare this with regular disk usage:

df -h

Find Directories with Excessive Files

Locate where the inodes are being consumed:

sudo find / -xdev -type d -exec sh -c 'echo "$(find "$1" -maxdepth 1 | wc -l) $1"' _ {} \; | sort -rn | head -20

Common culprits include mail queues, session files, cache directories, and log rotation remnants.

Clean Up Small Files

Once you identify the problematic directory, remove unneeded files:

# Example: clean old PHP session files
find /var/lib/php/sessions -type f -mtime +7 -delete

# Example: clean mail queue
find /var/spool/mail -type f -empty -delete

Prevent Future Exhaustion

• Set up cron jobs to regularly clean temporary file directories
• Configure log rotation to compress and remove old log files
• Monitor inode usage alongside disk space in your alerting system
• For new filesystems, specify a higher inode count at creation time with mkfs.ext4 -N

Other Causes

If inodes are not exhausted, check for deleted files still held open by processes:

sudo lsof +L1

Restarting the process holding the deleted file will release the disk space immediately.