How to wipe temp files to get more free space? [Manjaro KDE]

Hello,

Today I payed attention to free disk space and I was surprised by Linux a a bad way. While my windows 7 with a lot of programs installed use only 62,3 GiB from a 223,5 GiB SSD drive. I’ve been using Manjaro from just 2 months in a dedicated SSD with 210,4 GiB and it’s using 160,4 GiB, wow.

The first think I looked was the Timeshift snapshots and I had only 5 once I have manual set up, I just deleted 2 snapshots without much effect in the free space.

So what I should look for in my system to get more free space?

It worth to mention that I have dedicated SSD drive for Games, maybe there are some temp files in main SSD, don’t know but it’s strange I wasn’t expecting such a high space consume from Linux.

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160 GB’s for a system that does not contain games is a bit much.

But you can do this to get a good overview of where your space has actually gone.

  1. Open a terminal and install ncdu with sudo pacman -S ncdu.
  2. Run sudo ncdu /.

This will generate an ncurses interface with an overview of the folders sorted in the order of highest space taken. Disregard your WIN-SSD folder here.
I would expect Timeshift to be taking alot of space (first snapshot is always largest) and maybe your pacman cache in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/.

You can also just press the “Explore in Filelight” button, you have in your screenshot and it will generate a visual GUI to see where the folders taking up space.

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I can recommend BleachBit, its like CCleaner in Windows… just for Linux with a nice GUI and its also available in Manjaro repo.

No need to resort to such external programs with wonky track record.

  • journal
$ journalctl --disk-usage
$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M
  • package cache
$ du -shc /var/cache/pacman
$ sudo paccache -rk2
  • user cache
$ du -shc $HOME/.cache/* | sort -hr | head -10
  • some users reported huge $HOME/.xsession-errors files in the past
$ ls -lh $HOME/.xsession-errors
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See also: System maintenance - ArchWiki

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Hello, thank for all replies,

After deleting some Timeshift snapshots and ponting in the first post I also deleted old update files thought the command below, but it’s not worth doing it because it saves only 1,3 GiB, so not so much and it’s safer to keep some cache in case of downgrade, it’s sad.

$ paccache -r

So I used the suggested tool Filelight and it is very nice feature, So I was able to found the 2 main issues for the big space being used, Torrent Folder not properly redirected to another Hard Disk, so I corrected the link, and TimeShift, it consumes a lot of space, it almost like back-uping the system mirroring all the files. Hoping for BTRFS to became the standard in the near future, they said the the back-up is faster and use less space.

Wow, amazing.

For me, the usual suspects are stuff like PlasmaConfigSaver - which bloats my config directory somewhat to about 8GiB…
Then podcasts (The Infinite Monkey Cage is 3.5GiB) and .cache is pretty big too…
But 250GiB system disk - not an issue. Wouldn’t be clever on a laptop without extra storage options though.

Hmmm one issue I have with ncdu / is that it includes my Timeshift (mounted /run/timeshift - where it’s also mounted by the system as /mnt/T3/timeshift and is a separate drive).

ncdu -x
.  40.6 GiB [##########] /home                                                                        
.  20.0 GiB [####      ] /usr
.  15.5 GiB [###       ] /var
    8.0 GiB [#         ]  swapfile
    3.5 GiB [          ] /opt
  103.9 MiB [          ] /boot
.  17.7 MiB [          ] /etc
  168.0 KiB [          ]  file
   24.0 KiB [          ]  desktopfs-pkgs.txt
!  16.0 KiB [          ] /lost+found
   12.0 KiB [          ] /srv
    8.0 KiB [          ]  rootfs-pkgs.txt
!   4.0 KiB [          ] /root
    4.0 KiB [          ] /mnt
    4.0 KiB [          ]  .manjaro-tools
@   0.0   B [          ]  FileBot_4.9.3-aur.tar.xz
@   0.0   B [          ]  filebot.sh
@   0.0   B [          ]  sbin
@   0.0   B [          ]  lib64
@   0.0   B [          ]  lib
@   0.0   B [          ]  bin
>   0.0   B [          ] /tmp
>   0.0   B [          ] /sys
>   0.0   B [          ] /run
>   0.0   B [          ] /proc
>   0.0   B [          ] /dev
Ncdu Scan Options

These options affect the scanning progress and have no effect when importing directory information from a file.

-x
Do not cross filesystem boundaries, i.e. only count files and directories on the same filesystem as the directory being scanned.

84GiB

Red is /home
cyan is /usr - that’s 1/4 and the next cyan from that is office6
purple /var and 9GiB pacman cache
pink mostly Plex server.

So what did you add that takes up an extra 80GiB more than this?

So sure, ncdu is ncurses, so you go into your top 3 or so directories (that’s 76GiB of my 87.4GiB anyway) and poke around in there.

Certainly one game 0 A.D for me increased the bloat quite a lot. Also Plex is heavy on storage with huge caches.

For installed stuff, I do a clean every now and then
clean='paccache -rvuk0 && sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=2weeks'

Good luck :wink:

Oh, and don’t forget to look in Timeshift and exclude some crud from there…
/var/lib/plex is a big one to remember. That would double my restore time (maybe a million mostly tiny files in there…)