[vox-tech] HD filling up - what can we delete?

[Ken Bloom]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 01:15:05PM -0800, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 10:55:04AM -0800, Hookand Crook wrote:
> > Our small HD is getting a mite full and we notice that in various
> > places we might do some house cleaning.
> > 
> > In usr/src/kernels I find all the old kernels we're not using.
> > Currently we are using 2.6.15-1.1831_FC4-i686 and there is a bunch of
> > older stuff there that is not being used. Could I just dump that?
> > 
> > Are there any other places that I might do some additional house
> > cleaning to free up some space? Especially in the Mozilla folder?
> 
> Depending on your distro, you might have a cache of package files.
> 
> My HDD is very close to full (well, that last 1% is pretty large, but
> when it gets close to there, regular users can no longer create files
> on my root partition, which is bad, since that's where /tmp lives).
> 
> So, as I run Debian, I regularly do this after any install or update+upgrade:

Can you say cronjob?

5 16 * * * (apt-get --yes clean; apt-get --yes update; apt-get --yes
--download-only dist-upgrade; apt-get --yes --download-only upgrade;
apt-file update) 2> /dev/null > /dev/null

(I download both upgrade and dist-upgrade, because sometimes a packages is
removed in dist-upgrade because a dependancy is removed, while that
package would be upgraded if its depenancy stuck around and blocked
something else)

>   sudo aptitude clean
>   sudo aptitude autoclean

If you're running the first one, then the second is unnecessary,
because it won't do anything.

> Checking "/var/" for large log files that you might want to rotate or
> disable could be good.
> 
> Removing apps that you never use (I got rid of some games I never played
> that included MBs of music and graphics, and I got rid of OpenOffice.org,
> since I stick with KOffice) could be a good idea, too.

In Debian, deborphan, debfoster, can help immensely. Aptitude's
tracking of automatic vs. manual installations is also very useful in
this regard, but it's not a catch-all, and you have to go through the
packages list periodically and remove things you no longer use.

> FileLight (a KDE GUI app) is a great tool for looking at your disk usage
> graphically.  There are others, such as "xdf", too.
> 
> And there are always command-line tools like "find" (with "-size" searching)
> and "du".  For example:
> 
>   du -x / | sort -n 2> /dev/null
> 
> That is:
> 
>   du    == Disk Usage ("estimate file space usage")
>   -x    == aka "--one-file-system": skip directories on different filesystems
>   /     == start from your root directory (change depending on your needs;
>            see output of "mount" and "df")
>   |     == pipe the output to...
>   sort  == sort the output
>   -n    == numerically (versus in terms of ASCII... i.e., 2 is less than 10 :)
>   2>    == take any stderr output
>   /dev/null == and throw it away

These all do sort of the same thing. You want to do these things on
home directories and other data directories. You don't want to throw
away big system directories just because they're big.

--Ken

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