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my /work filesystem had reached the limit of 1000G of memory in use. I then started to delete a number of large files and got the number down to about 800G but over time, it kept increasing again at a rate of about a gigabyte per minute so now it has reached 1000G again. I have tried to track down the problem using “du -cks” but did not manage to find anything out of the ordinary.

How to diagnose this?

First, get the terms right. You mean storage, not memory. Depending on your setup, may require root.
Something is complaining, and is spamming logs.

If your installation is older than recent, your freespace might be lower than it could be, because you've accumulated obsolete .debs in the /var/cache/ tree. An older installation may have more space used by packages in the cache than packages that are currently installed. sudo apt clean will completely purge the downloaded package cache. This is totally unrelated to log spamming, other than both waste copious amounts of space.

To aid in searching for waste, I recommend you give ncdu a try.

To see where the largest files in your home directory you could run:

I find "ncdu" to be most helpful in these situations, you may need to install it first but it lists folders with the sizes displayed making tracing large files and/or directories much easier.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

My main issue is : Different used disk space with du and quota.

I tried all options but could not rectify the issue. The total occupied space and summation of all subdirectories also is much less than 1000G (145G). When I try to find out my quota usage it surprisingly displays 1000G. So, still I could not find the mysterious reason of 1000G occupancy. Could you please suggest how to unfold this?

thanks

Please suggest/advice ways to rectify the isse

kanyakumarirock wrote: 2024-01-23 12:18 Please suggest/advice ways to rectify the isse

We already did that, just not in detail. Start by identifying the locations of excess space consumption. Login in a vtty or gui terminal with root privileges, then cd /, then ncdu and have a look around. If ncdu is not installed, install it: apt install ncdu. If space is unavailable to uninstall it, try apt clean and try again to install it. I have zero experience with quota, so cannot help with its issues or any problems it causes.

I think more info about your setup is required.

Follow up:

du apparently does not count deleted files

The most frequent cause of this behaviour according to some quick forum searches is (as @CwF said) logs

Monitoring logs with or looking for errors in is worth trying again.

bbbhltz wrote: 2024-01-23 16:08du apparently does not count deleted files

I suppose this must refer to files moved to a DE trash container, because doing that merely hides them. It doesn't delete them. Trash must be emptied to actually get them out of the filesystem and free the space they continue to consume while in the trash.

Done