I recently ran into an issue where backups for a project were taking much more space than I thought they should. I figured there was a large error log somewhere – and sure enough I was able to easily find it with the following command:
du -sh *
That command du (disk usage) along with the options -sh (s = summarize, h = human readable) will then output something like this:
7.9M admin 700K api 1.4G delivery 4.0K error_log 44K images 4.0K index.php 4.0K robots.txt
From there I can then see that the big disk space hog is in the “delivery” directory. Running the command then within that directory then showed there was a huge 1.4G error log which needed addressed.
This command is very useful and will save a lot of time if you run into a similar situation as I did.