constantly running out of disk space - HELP!

[penguin2]

I'm not sure what to do but I'm hoping someone can suggest a solution and help me understand what's going on.

I have several partitions and different distros installed. Each one (almost all now) have run out of disk space. I guess I plead ignorance here and please forgive me if I sound somewhat like I'm complaining...because.... I guess I am! I mean, isn't this what I had to fear in Windows?

Unfortunately, I am not sure what I can delete other than data and I don't want to do that. I would have to do a lot of investigating and reviewing what I got and what I'm willing to get rid of. Is it just mostly data accumulating or is there some files/directories that become created that I can delete? In Linux, I am not sure what I can remove.

I suppose I need to obtain some storage (external drives?) if I want to keep anything? Am I doing something wrong? I rarely see posts or Linux users concerned about lack of disk space. I thought 20 GB was sufficient for a partition for a Linux distro. Well, unless you're using Virtual Box or something.

Can anyone suggest solutions here? I just want to avoid the problem in the future and plan better but hopefully, there is something I can do now. My only idea was to obtain a couple of Terabyte drives and store/copy my data I want to keep on there and maybe re-install the Linux operating systems/distros. I thought it might be real messy for me to try and figure out what I can and can't delete (that is, without hosing each partition).

Any recommendations, ideas and/or suggested courses of action?

How do you manage your disk space?

[reed9]

20 GB is plenty for a linux distro - I don't think I've ever passed 10 GB on an install. (Programs and system files, not personal files, of course.)

What distro are you running?

What is the output of

df -h

Outside of your home directory, there really isn't much you should delete. Have you been downloading a lot of programs and have you cleaned the cache out?

If you're running Debian/Ubuntu or derivative, here is how to do that: Free Disk Space from APT’s Cache | Tombuntu

[penguin2]

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7              21G   19G  414M  98% /
tmpfs                 2.0G  4.0K  2.0G   1% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  140K  9.9M   2% /dev
tmpfs                 2.0G  132K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm

I use Mepis, Kubuntu, Fedora.... those three, mostly.

Btw, is there any chance this thread would apply to me?:

"freeing disc space" title - this site won't let me post the html.

I've downloaded programs and accumulated various files, I guess.

Thanks for the link!

[penguin2]

P.S. Unless there are some commands that can clear up a lot of space (I've tried 'autoclean' but not much space was cleared), I thought of just copying files/programs to a separate drive. If I can use a 500GB drive that's already in my computer, can I do this? Would this complicate things if I need to access files from it or is it good? I guess I would like to know if this is an option and how to do it. I use the 'cp' command or how do you advise this process?

Thanks.

[reed9]

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ubu...c-space-2.html

The early suggestions in that thread won't clear up a tremendous amount of space. I would guess it's your home directory that's taking up all the room. You can definitely move all of your files in there to a separate drive.

This command in the other thread could be useful for seeing what in your home directory is taking up space.

du -s ~/* | sort -nr | cut -f 2- |xargs -i du -sh {}

[penguin2]

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ubu...c-space-2.html

The early suggestions in that thread won't clear up a tremendous amount of space. I would guess it's your home directory that's taking up all the room. You can definitely move all of your files in there to a separate drive.

This command in the other thread could be useful for seeing what in your home directory is taking up space.

du -s ~/* | sort -nr | cut -f 2- |xargs -i du -sh {}

I was afraid of that. Thanks for the command.....

I think most of it is in a couple of directories so I can move my files to a separate drive?

Do I use the mv command or cp command might be better to make sure it's copied there and I don't lose or corrupt data?

[Zeroangel]

Definitely move the biggest files or folder to another drive which has lots of space to host them. You can then symbolically link to those folders from your home folder.

As an example lets say your /home/$USER/Music folder takes up 5GB of space, and you have an extra partition which mounts at /media/shared

Move your music folder to your /media/shared folder

Then create a symbolic link to it by running this command

sudo ln -s /media/shared/Music /home/$USER/Music

You will have freed up that space on your primary partition (since the files are now physically located on the other partition), but since you made a symbolic link you will still be able to access them as if they were actually stored on your primary partition.

Another way to symlink is to hold ALT while dragging and dropping a file from your the partition you want to symlink from, to the folder you want to symlink to (click your newly moved /media/shared/Music folder, and while holding ALT, drag/drop it to your /home/username/ folder)