Out of space

[Karl Auer]

On Mon, 2016-08-01 at 11:07 -0400, Richard Barmann wrote:
> When I am in Unbuntu 16.04 I am told I am short of room. When I am in
> Kubuntu I do not get that message. How can I send a copy of my drives
> to this forum to get advice on making room. I have emptied the trash.

There is no magic to disk space. If you are running out of disk space,
you need to delete stuff you don't need, move stuff off to alternative
storage, or move to a bigger disk or disks.

Common things that are better off stored on external devices are video
collections, music collections, clip collections, photograph
collections, Ubuntu distributions :-) and other such collections of
largish files. Put 'em on USB sticks, portable drives, into the cloud,
or (if you have one) onto a NAS, and then delete them off your
computer.

Some applications generate a lot of data, too. Audacity leaves a
smoking trail of audio data behind it, for example, and if you edit
video you can end up with lots of quite large temporary files. Move
finished projects off your computer.

Your browsers will cache stuff. Go into the settings and limit the
amount of cache to something sensible.

If you use virtual machines, they will chew up anything from five to
fifty gigabytes a pop. Unused systems should be exported and stored
somewhere else.

If you don't know where all your disk space went, start with this:

    cd
    du | tr -s /\ // | sort -r --key=1n | tac | less

That will show you the sizes (in kilobytes) of the directories in your
home directory, in order of size, which will give you a good idea of
where to start. If the total size - the first line - is not overly
large, then you can aim your seek and destroy mission elsewhere :-)

Ubuntu itself is very unlikely to occupy more than about 10GB and
probably more like six or seven.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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