Recently I realized that the Disks utility was showing 8.6 GiB consumed on my Ubuntu partition (I have Xubuntu installed on another partition and have one FAT partition). I decided to free up some disk space by deleting temporary files. I found that there is no tool in Dapper to automate this process. There is a tool for KDE called ‘Kleansweep‘ and also there is a feature specification on launchpad to integrate a similar tool in Ubuntu. But right now Dapper users should do it manually relying on Google and their own instincts to decide what is safe to delete and what could break their system’s stability.
To free up disk space we need to delete unnecessary files. But where are these files and how do I know that it is safe to delete them? I have found that it is safe to delete files in /home/username/.thumbnails/normal and /home/username/.thumbnails/fail folder.
It is also safe to delete the downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archives I personally don’t like to delete these files. Infact I even copy and paste these files to a separate partition on my hard disk. Why? Because these files are the downloaded packages we install using apt (apt-get or synaptic). If we uninstall a package and then later decide to reinstall it we will have to download it again which consumes time and bandwidth. But if you are not like one of those people who install and uninstall software on a daily basis without need or reason then it is safe to delete these files.
You can also free up disk space by emptying browser cache, saved chat files, old log files, etc.
Have we cleaned all unnecessary files? I don’t think so. I really think that there should be an easy to use application to do this job.
