ERROR - No space left on device

Hello there, I am having difficulty starting n8n again after running out of storage. After start docker compose , it results with following error.

I know there is shortage of storage in my server, but I cannot free up space or don’t know how to do so without any significant information loss. Storage is full due to executions. I tried solution mentioned in documentation about data pruning. See Executions data

I simple added two environment variable in docker compose file hoping it would delete all old data after start.

data_pruning
But I does not start up . Giving the same error message. Could you please offer some solutions, maybe manually deleting some executions data to free up some space.

Information on your n8n setup

  • Database (default: SQLite): Postgres
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): docker compose
  • Operating system: ubuntu

Hey @Rahim_Sharifov,

Welcome to the community :tada:

You will need to free up some space on your server, if you are running Postgres on the same server you would first need to get it running so you can delete some execution data by connecting to the database.

Have you already gone through the normal server maintenance steps and checked for unused docker images and Linux kernels that can be deleted?

Yeah , It is due to executions that were saved. Well cannot get docker up running to connect to it and delete. Well I guess , I need to delete some data manually on server. But I don’t know where the execution data is stored.

Hey @Rahim_Sharifov,

The execution data is stored in the database, The best way to clear that would be to start up the database and remove it from there.

How did you work out it was down to the execution data? Did you already go through old docker images, Most people don’t clear them and it can often free up a couple of GB depending on when you last did the clean up.