Problem

A huge file appears in your file system. Sometimes it is over 70TB.

Analysis

It looks like you had some memory corruption when this file was written, so something was put into the high 32 bits of the file size. The value 70368744179059 is 0x400000000573, so 1395 plus a single bit set way up in the top of the high 32 bits of the file size.

In my particular case this caused me problems to load a web application (Magento).


Solution

You can just delete the file and re-create it and all should be well. I would strongly suggest running memtest86 for 12-24 hours on this system to verify that your memory is correct. Other possibilities include cable errors.

Running e2fsck will not “fix” this, since technically it is legal to have a file size much larger than the actual amount of data on disk.

Resource

70TB huge file in ext3 file system
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