Invisible hd useage - what gives?

[Tyrannocaster]

According to QDirStat looking at / I have 10.7 gigs of stuff on my system disk, which is a 120 gig SSD. I realize that it doesn't actually give me 120 gigs - actually, my terminal tells me it's only 109.5 gigs. I can live with that - I'm used to the formatted disk being smaller than the advertised size.

So I have 109.5 gigs of disk here, with 10.7 gigs of files on it. Why, then, do I only have 83.6 gigs of free space? I deleted my Timeshift backup file, which was something like 7 or 8 gigs, but it seems like I never got the free space back. I checked, and there are no trash bins with files in them, and if there were, they should show up in the QDirStat program's listing.

By my math, there's something rather large that I can't find here.

[bitsnpcs]

Hello,
have you tried Menu>System>Lite Tweaks
It could be temporary files and also Package cache.

[Tyrannocaster]

I already did the tweaks, but it didn't save much space. In this case, the invisible files are as big as my entire installation of Linux Lite plus all the other stuff I've added, plus all my user files. I don't think it's hurting anything, but I also don't think it should be happening; if it got worse, I wouldn't know how to figure out what to do since I've tried everything I can think of. There just don't seem to be any actual invisible files anywhere that are very big, but something is taking up about 10 gigs of hard drive space that I can't account for.

The temporary files and package caches are part of the 10.7 gigs that QDirStat shows as legitimate useage.

[Tyrannocaster]

I found it, but I can't see it and I can't figure out how to delete it. Poking around the internet, I discovered this command:

sudo du -xh / |grep '^\S*[0-9\.]\+G'|sort -rn [I had to use sudo or it wouldn't run]

and this is the result:

8.8G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58
8.8G /root/.local/share/Trash/files
8.8G /root/.local/share/Trash
8.8G /root/.local/share
8.8G /root/.local
8.8G /root
8.7G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost
4.9G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/usr
4.7G /usr
2.8G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/usr/lib
2.7G /usr/lib
2.3G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/var
2.2G /var
1.7G /home/ben
1.7G /home
1.6G /usr/share
1.6G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/usr/share
1.4G /home/ben/.cache
1.3G /var/cache
1.3G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/var/cache
1.2G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
1.1G /var/cache/apt
1.1G /root/.local/share/Trash/files/2018-10-02_15-09-58/localhost/var/cache/apt

So you were right, there are trash files, only they don't show up in my file manager even though I have it set to view hidden files. Some of these are duplicates, but not all of them.

How do I delete these? (Only the ones in the trash, of course.)

EDIT: I used Krusader in superuser mode to delete these, because it could see them. It worked great. I would have preferred to do this through the terminal, but I am new enough to Linux that I was not confidant I wouldn't mess things up. This did it though.

[DeepThought]

Maybe this might help point you in the right direction :

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=970708

From what I gather using sudo to empty root trash won't work as sudo just gives a normal user admin privileges. You will need to su to root and empty the trash in root's home folder .... i.e. /root

[supergamer]

That is interesting as I am not even generating a trash in my root filesystem. I'll look into this and see if I can find a one liner that is simple and can be made into a launcher later today.

[supergamer]

I am not sure if you have Bleachbit installed but it will empty the root trash when you use the run as administrator that would be put into the menu by installing Bleachbit. You have to be very careful when using this as to not clean to much stuff out but it does work

[Tyrannocaster]

I am not sure if you have Bleachbit installed but it will empty the root trash when you use the run as administrator that would be put into the menu by installing Bleachbit. You have to be very careful when using this as to not clean to much stuff out but it does work

i have read so many warnings about Bleachbit that I decided to leave it for later, when I know more about what I am doing.