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VPS Disk Usage Investigation (Resolved 2026-02-04)

Status: Resolved | Scope: Explain and fix a large df vs du discrepancy that threatened crawl continuity.

Outcome

This was not an ext4 accounting bug. Root cause was annual crawl output directories ending up on the VPS root filesystem instead of being tiered/mounted onto the Storage Box, pushing / into the worker safety threshold.

Canonical Incident Note

  • ../../operations/incidents/2026-02-04-annual-crawl-output-dirs-on-root-disk.md

Mitigation Summary

  • Pause crawls during recovery.
  • Copy affected job output dirs to the Storage Box.
  • Re-apply annual output tiering mounts.
  • Remove local root-disk copies to restore headroom.

Historical Context

Full investigative commands and intermediate hypotheses are preserved in git history.