Answer by josephj11

josephj11 — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:19:18 -0400

As @Seth Brown says, du is your friend. You can also use ls -rlRt / | less or find / -mtime 5 | less to find files that have recently been accessed and possibly changed. You could then sort them in reverse order by size by piping the output into the sort command.

Finding out what changed is half of the battle. Then, you have to find out why and if the files can be deleted without affecting anything else.

Answer by Seth Brown

Seth Brown — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:58:10 -0400

Ok, Donald.

First thing - do you have it backed up? To an external USB drive. The whole thing?

You probably need to purge your Firefox cache for a start. Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear your recent History -> select Cache -> Ok.

Then, there are a bunch of .hidden directories that accumulate stuff.

I have found ncdu to be a useful tool, but without some stuff to download and compile it, you probably won't be able to use it.

There is a utility called File Size Viewer that will show you how your disk space is being used. You can run that and see if there is any thing in your home folder that you can get rid of. You may have old files that you have forgotten about.

Look in .local/share/Trash to see if you have files there that can be deleted.

If you open a terminal window, the command

du -scm * | sort -n

will sort your folders so that the largest is at the bottom. You can then examine those folders to see if you can delete anything from them.

You should also look in /tmp for files that can be deleted.

I would also suggest that you mount your home folder on a SD card so that the SSD drive holds only your operating system.

Answers to: Is dcopserver running is the error message

Answer by josephj11

Answer by Seth Brown