Heads up: the database, table, and column names in this post are dummies. I've swapped the real production names for generic ones (app_prod, call_transcripts, call_records, and so on) so nothing internal leaks. Every command, number, and step is exactly what I ran.
It was 2 a.m. and the production root disk was sitting at 94%. Twenty-two gigabytes free on a 338 GB volume, and still creeping up. In a few hours an army of voice agents, dozens of them, each running its own script, was scheduled to start dialing, and every call they place writes to the same database. There wasn't even enough free space to take a backup before touching anything, and the disk was going to fill on its own long before I could resize it.
One thing saved the night. A second, nearly empty data volume was already mounted on the box, roughly 294 GB free, doing basically nothing. So the plan was easy to say and a little scary to run: get the biggest table off the root disk and onto that volume, without deleting a single row, and without the shortcut that would've quietly blown up a week later.
Here's exactly how it went.
First: what was actually eating the disk
