[nmglug] hard disk usage

[Ed Brown]

BrianO'Keefe wrote:
> In trying to determine why my HD is down to 2GB remaining I used
> Kdirstat, Baobab and du.
> On volume /:
> Baobab says disk usage is 10.73 GB
> Kdirstat says 13.2GB used
> du says 13 GB used
> Nautilus says 2GB remaining of 14.9GB available
> I only do updates as they come along and except for some photos and docs
> created and me constantly winnowing out outdated stuff my disk space
> just gets eaten up.
> Maybe I just complaining but hey! It's a slow day

Well, 3 of the 4 are fairly consistent.  (Baobab is just babeling.)  2 
free GB out of 15 is trouble though.

Sometimes when trying to free space, I list packages by size and try 
to remove the biggest and most useless.  You can sometimes buy a gig 
or two without much pain this way.

other possibilities:
Does your package manager cache packages when you do updates?  (yum 
can do this, though not by default.)
Try something like 'du -h --max-depth=1' starting in /, to find large 
directories.  If /usr is the culprit, all you can do is remove 
software.  But if /var or /tmp or /home is out of control, get ruthless.
Disks are cheap - get an external if you can't replace or add internal.
One more thing: stop whining!  (disclaimer for the serious-minded: I 
am NOT being serious.)

-ed