Recently notifications have been popping up, telling me that the disk is almost full. Since I don’t store that much on my laptop, I was a little surprised.
I tried to use the “Disk Usage Analyzer”, but it doesn’t really show where all the space has gone (see images). The SSD has 512 GB, but the Analyzer only shows 32GB for the whole disk (???) and 222GB for my home folder. Am I using the tool wrong? Or is there a better way to find out what is occupying the space?
inxi in a terminal or in console.inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width
)Do you use snapshots ?
Did the analyzer run as root ?
~/.local looks like rather large, but if you have games in it, then it can be explained, but maybe look further what is there. Is the only one that looks out of “proportions”.
~/.cache can sometimes get also large, but usually some people avoid cleaning it up from time to time, even tho they can …
All the rest looks normal to me. You can clean up package cache too by running:
sudo pacman -Scc
Having “battled”, but not really, with the same this last few days, I can recommend this:
sudo du --human-readable --max-depth=1 --exclude "/tmp" / | sort -h
Examinne the output and drill down from there to find out what’s the cause.
Hope this helps!
Tip:
When posting terminal output, copy the output and paste it here, wrapped in three (3) backticks, before AND after the pasted text. Like this:
```
pasted text
```
This will just cause it to be rendered like this:
Sed
sollicitudin dolor
eget nisl elit id
condimentum
arcu erat varius
cursus sem quis eros.
Instead of like this:
Sed sollicitudin dolor eget nisl elit id condimentum arcu erat varius cursus sem quis eros.
Alternatively, paste the text you wish to format as terminal output, select all pasted text, and click the </> button on the taskbar. This will indent the whole pasted section with one TAB, causing it to render the same way as described above.
Thereby increasing legibility thus making it easier for those trying to provide assistance.
For more information, please see:
Also, if your language isn’t English, please prepend any and all terminal commands with LC_ALL=C. For example:
LC_ALL=C bluetoothctl
This will just cause the terminal output to be in English, making it easier to understand and debug.
As hinted by @andreas85 and @Mirdarthos, analyzing your system with your regular user may only show you the folders you have permission to access. You may need superuser privileges in order to analyze everything.
Try cleaning unnecesarry files using bleachbit. It is a tool that will help you clean your cache, temp files, cookies and it has other features also…
To install it:
sudo pacman -Syu bleachbit
I’d use sudo du -hxd1 / | sort -h, it can be more accurate since it’ll exclude any other filesystem including /tmp, /run, /sys, /proc, /dev, etc.
-h human readable
-x don’t cross filesystem boundaries
-d1 max depth 1, has to go last because of the 1
Thank you for this!