What's the source of "Other Usage" in Disk Space?

Question

What's the "Other Usage" in my cPanel account and how do I locate the information?

Answer

The "Other Usage" are files not within your cPanel user's home directory but owned by the cPanel users, as well as the metadata that the system uses to store email in the mail directory, the email in Trash folders, or the files that you do not have permission to access.

The most common file types would be email contents, backups, or /tmp.

Procedure

1. Log into the server via ssh as the 'root' user.
2. Run the following command. Please be sure to replace $username with the actual cPanel username.

   cpaneluser=$username && find / -path /home/virtfs -prune -o -path /home/${cpaneluser}  -prune -o -user "${cpaneluser}" -type f -ls > files_outside_homedir.txt 2>/dev/null

3. Run the following command below to calculate the disk size.

   awk '{SUM += $7} END {print SUM}' files_outside_homedir.txt

   • Please note that the output from the command above will get you the number of filesystem blocks used, as filesystem quotas are based on blocks. 
   • In order to get an idea of the conversion between blocks and size, you can run the following command:

     stat -c "%b blocks of %B bytes per block" /path/to/file

     For example, if a file uses 16 blocks of 512 bytes each, the total size of that file on disk is 8k, even though the file might only be 5.4K. 

If the above procedure does not find any large file outside the home directory, it could be due to an open file, which you can locate with the following command.

lsof +L1 | awk '{if ($7 > 0) print}'