I was watching YouTube with Tor Browser, when the storage on my computer got full. This happened yesterday and the storage got emptied again after a while. The program that shows what files use up storage showed that /var and timeshift had used up the most. When the storage got full again today, I ignored it, since it had just gone down again the other day.
This time YouTube started crashing first, then programs wouldn’t open. I couldn’t even turn the computer off on the GUI, so I pressed the power switch on my laptop.
I went into recovery mode and under system summary it says /dev/mapper/mint--vg-root is using 214GB, 100% use. I pressed resume and was able to open it up for a short while. Under program files it says 0 bytes free space.
Does anyone know what all that used up storage is? What can I do to reset my laptop? I don’t have any important files and I had barely even downloaded software so I don’t mind if it all gets deleted.
Currently back in recovery menu.
Details: Asus X541U Laptop Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon, with Linux 4.15.0-52-generic (recovery mode)
Edit: I deleted a few files with the root shell prompt. Then I was able to start mint normally. Checking the free space it had a bit more than 1GB. It started going down again without me doing anything. I thought maybe it’s downloading something so I turned off the wifi but it kept going until things stopped working again.
Edit2: I deleted a timeshift snapshots depository and it freed up about 70GB. Should I just remove timeshift? Because it copying files made me unable to use anything. Also I have no idea why snapshots are so big when I have almost nothing downloaded. Otherwise, I’m able to use my laptop now again.