How big is the problem of your hard disk drive getting full? If it is anything like what happened to me, LOTS. I am still trying to come to terms with all that happened on my laptop.
Like any self-respecting geek, I run Linux as my primary desktop. In fact I have 3 Linux distros installed on my fairly small hard disk. As a result, most of my disk partitions are filled to the brim. Sometimes I need to delete stuff from my disk even to make way for even a 300MB file. On my Fedora9 partition, I have both root and /home on the same partition. On one of the unfortunate days last week, while I was compiling some code, the partition reached 100% full. I wasn't alarmed, after all, how bad can this be? But it was going to be quite bad.
The first thing that I noticed was that bash command history did not work. The next bash shell I spawned did not show a proper prompt (PS1). Little investigation showed that my ~/.bash* files did not exist any more! I frantically started looking at my $HOME to noticed that a number of small files, like my custom scripts directory, were missing. I don't know what else and how much more I have lost. Didn't I back up my entire home dir? Yeah, right.
I know, this is NOT what you expect and people will tell me this cannot happen. Unless I am trying one of the bleeding edge file systems. But I was on good old ext3. I did not find any hint about this in kernel messages. I tried googling for this, but this problem is very difficult to phrase and my attempts did not hit anything. I wonder whether anyone who reads this blog has hit such a problem or have any idea what might have happened. One more thing: I am NOT willing to try to recreate this problem ;-)
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