Visualizing disk space usage on linux server using ncdu

After getting one "fullest disk > 80%" alert too many for our continious integration servers and getting frustrated with apparently full disks, I decided too look into a solution that helps you find where the diskspace in your server is going.

For Mac OSX I have always used OmniDiskSweeper, a pretty neat visual tool that indexes your harddrive and and shows you the folders that contain the most megabytes. For linux servers I have fiddled around with "find large files commands" such as du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10 which simply do not give you the amount of detail needed to thoroughly clean up a harddisk.

Thats when I found NCDU, a disk space analyzer that is just one apt-get install ncdu away from visualizing your harddrive and navigating around folders with high consumption. I found it an absolute delight to work with, give it a try!