My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 5402 with a 500GB NVMe SSD Drive, and over the past 18 months the “root” partition has slowly filled up to 83%. The root partition was 27.94GB and only 4.63GB remained unused.
I used the Ubuntu Disk Usage Analyzer on the laptop to find what was filling up the partition.
The three first steps I used to get the 83% under control are:
1 – The biggest bunch of files was found in the Logs folder. I was able to get that controlled by following the instructions in this article:
Free up Disk Space – Clear Systemd Journal Logs in Ubuntu 20.04
The best feature of this article is that you don’t just remove older logs, you also can set a limit to how much disk size for logs based upon how old the logs are, a maximum total size for the logs, and limit the number of logs.
2 – Another tool shows you how to clean up old Snap package versions:
How to Clean Up Snap Package Versions in Linux
https://itsfoss.com/clean-snap-packages/
All you have to do to clean out old Snap packages is to copy/paste a small script from the article and save it in your home directory to run every month or so to remove the older versions. The article is very clear and works great, just follow the steps in the article to set it up.
3 – uCareSystem is an all in one system maintenance tool for Ubuntu & Linux Mint
uCareSystem – All-in-one system update and maintenance tool for Ubuntu/LinuxMint
This tool’s features are:
Update package lists (It will refresh package index)
Downloads and install updates
Update packages and system libraries to latest available version
Remove unneeded, obsolete & orphaned packages
Remove old kernels (It keeps the current and previous one for safety purpose)
Remove unused config files
Clean downloaded temporary packagesEasy to install and use on a regular basis.
Unfortunately these three processes did not permanently solve the problem, however it helped buy some time while I continued to look for a more permanent/long-term solution.
More info on that in the next post….