Umbrel on Bitcoin Machine will not start

Support and Troubleshooting
1

My umbrel ran out of disk space so I removed some apps, and now there is plenty of space but it still will not start up properly.

In the debug logs I have lines similar to this for tor_server, tor_proxy, manager, auth, and dashboard:

ERROR: for dashboard Cannot start service dashboard: failed to start shim: mkdir /var/lib/containerd/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/ae93d13a7f38eeff271b6cc702b5410fafdca9a27c925c5afa342ece2c66da8c: no space left on device: unknown

However it seems there is space on the device?

Filesystem information

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 29G 29G 0 100% /
/dev/sda1 1.8T 824G 917G 48% /home/umbrel/umbrel

What should I do? This is Umbrel 0.5.4 running on a Bitcoin Machine device.

2

It’s possible that the Docker volumes from your uninstalled apps weren’t actually pruned, so try running “docker system prune -a --volumes” to confirm this. Also, although your device has space, your OS doesn’t, so that’s why you’ll need to prune the leftover Docker containers and maybe some other temp files / logs.

3

That said “Total reclaimed space: 2.75GB” but the same issue still persists unfortunately.

4

The error indicates that the directory /var/lib/containerd/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/… cannot be created due to “no space left on device.” Based on the filesystem information you provided:

  • The directory is likely on the / filesystem (/dev/root), which is reported as 100% full (Size: 29G, Used: 29G, Avail: 0).
  • Even though /dev/sda1 (mounted at /home/umbrel/umbrel) has plenty of space (917G available), the issue is with /dev/root, where /var/lib/containerd typically resides.

Why does it seem like there’s space?

The /dev/sda1 filesystem has space, but /var/lib/containerd is on /dev/root, which is completely full. Containers managed by Docker (or similar systems) often use /var/lib for runtime data, and this directory is on the root filesystem unless explicitly configured otherwise.

  • Move /var/lib/containerd to /dev/sda1: If cleaning up isn’t enough, you can move /var/lib/containerd to /home/umbrel/umbrel (which has space) and create a symlink:

sudo systemctl stop docker sudo mv /var/lib/containerd /home/umbrel/umbrel/containerd sudo ln -s /home/umbrel/umbrel/containerd /var/lib/containerd sudo systemctl start docker

Ensure Docker (or your container runtime) is stopped before moving files.

5

Yesss, that seems to have gotten it going again, thank you so much. I wonder why that partition is out of space though. It might be due to a failed upgrade to Umbrel 1.0 which I tried to do a while back… Decided to stay on 0.5.4 because it seems like people have problems getting the bitcoin machine LCD working on 1.0 and I don’t feel like dealing with that. I just use this as a simple bitcoind and electrs node.

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