Hi all.
Forgive me in advance for the lengthy description that follows, I just want to make sure I’m being thorough…
I have a tumbleweed install that is perhaps 2.5 years old. When I created it, I hadn’t run tumbleweed before for more than a few months without doing a nuke and pave. Thus when I set this one up, I used the suggested 40Gb root partition size, which has come back to haunt me several times in the form of perilously low diskspace on root. At some point maybe 5 months ago, I ran a standard zypper dup, and my machine wouldn’t boot afterward. I wasted considerable time trying to fix the problem before doing the sensible thing and booting from the previous snapshot. I thought that I had taken steps to make that snapshot my new default, but now am not sure.
In the intervening time, I have continued to do distribution upgrades, sometimes several per week, and despite religiously deleting snapshots, I now find myself with a root partition with only 16Gb free. About a month ago my zypper reported ~3600 packages to update, requiring ~5Gb of files. The last time this happened, I had about 18Gb free and thought I would be fine, but just barely squeaked by by deleting everything I could as my space dropped to near zero. Now that I have only 16Gb free, I am afraid to run the dup as I don’t think I will have sufficient space. I have only two snapshots left, 0 and 473, which is now up to 18Gb and has an asterisk next to it in the snapshot list:
localhost:~ # snapper list
# | Type | Pre # | Date | User | Used Space | Cleanup | Description | Userdata
-----+--------+-------+--------------------------+------+------------+---------+-------------+---------
0 | single | | | root | | | current |
473* | single | | Sun Jun 16 12:11:22 2019 | root | 18.05 GiB | | |
[1]+ Done $PANGPA start
localhost:~ #
So I have a couple of questions: first, is the fact that snapshot #473 has grown to 18Gb, and has an asterisk next to it, indicative of the fact that it is now the snapshot I’m booting from, and that it has grown to 18Gb because that is how different it is from #0?
Second, is there some way I can make #473 the new #0 or otherwise the default, so that I can reclaim that 18Gb of diskspace so I can run the distribution upgrade, which is now weeks overdue?
Any suggestions you can offer about how to “fix” this situation so that I can get that diskspace back and run zypper without breaking my system would be much appreciated. Thank you very much for reading this far!
Bill Donnelly