After getting my system up and running again I decided to make an image of my root partition with fsarchiver, to save myself a lot of time and effort when I next bork the system (I can't help but tinker
). I booted from the GParted live CD, mounted the root, and ran fsarchiver in verbose mode. Straight away I saw a lot of files flying by that really needn't be included and were otherwise wasting space in the archive and wasting time - KDE caches, apt-get downloads, font caches, thumbnail caches, etc.
So I restarted the system and set about clearing out the junk:
- ran sudo apt-get clean
- emptied the firefox cache
- deleted banshee's database (easy enough to restore again)
- emptied the wastebin
...and ran fsarchiver again. Just clearing those out shaved a couple of gigabytes from the archive; now it's small enough to fit on a DVD. Are there any other places I could clear files out from? I'm looking to be able to restore the system with the applications and configuration I have now, but basically empty of data. Ideally I should have done this after installing everything I wanted, but before starting to *use* the computer.
As I said there were a lot of cached thumbnails and fonts flying through the list in fsarchiver, but I don't know enough about where these are stored to go deleting things.