Disc full warning , Large folder size , Large Proc folder , what can I delete

[clemm17]

I have a 500 Gb SSD with Linux Mint 19.3 installed and the "File system" is almost full. I am having trouble figuring out why. I have two separate SATA drives I use for storage. Proc folder is 140.7 TB with sub folders numbered 1 to 7564 and 14 named folders that look normal : Asound, bus, driver, fs, irq ....
Home folder is 18.5 G. Lib is 14.3 G, Timeshift is 27.8G Usr 13.5 G. Var 13.1 G.
Opt folder is 246.6 Mb. Everything else is reasonably small <60Mb.
Is it safe to delete the numbered Proc folders. What can I safely delete? Is there an easy way to clean this up?
Thanks Mike

[rene]

I have a 500 Gb SSD [ ... ] Proc folder is 140.7 TB [... ]

That should've told you that, well, no it isn't /proc mounts a virtual filesystem; one that only provides an fs-based view onto kernel provided interfaces/information; the files/directories in it "do not in fact exist".

You may supposedly also have double-counted /lib there due to it these days being part of /usr and /var is large if you don't use flatpaks --- but it's a detail in any case: total of what you name is ~ 90G and on a 500G drive this is likely to say you have a separate, small-ish root partition which is what is almost full. The output of df would tell us.

Usually it's a matter of an e.g. < 50G root filesystem coupled with Timeshift saving its snapshots on said root filesystem. 28G I find to be a lot for something which you probably won't ever use anyway but it sounds like a few snapshots at most; also doesn't scream out "issue!". Depending on what you want, you could delete Timeshift snapshots and stop using it, or move them elsewhere, get rid of some unused flatpaks, ...

... but what you should very likely more fundamentally do is reinstall without a separate root and /home partition. Again need the output of df to say so with certainty but it would appear you're running into the generic problem with splitting of partitions, i.e., fragmentation of free space.

[Petermint]

Open Timeshift. Delete every snapshot except the most recent two. Timeshift should drop down to less than 20 GB.

Do you experiment with software? Delete the experiments you no longer use.

Open Update Manager. View Linux kernels. Keep only the current one and the previous one. Delete the rest. Each is about 400 MB.

The following commands will remove old stuff that is no longer needed.

Code: Select all

sudo apt autoremove --purge
sudo apt-get clean

Repeat each month until you get more space.

You cannot change partitions while they are mounted. You can boot from the USB install media and use GParted to change the partition allocations after you clean out the junk. Backup. Backup. Reallocate. Backup.

Moving the start of a partition is really slow. Make sure your machine is plugged in and the battery fully charged. Keep the cat and children away from the keyboard. Find something to do while the data migrates. Build a house. Invent faster than light travel. Invent a car battery that does not burst into flames like lithium. Cure cancer.

[clemm17]

Thank you. I believe /dev/sdb1 is the drive with linux on it I dont know why its full. I think /devsdd1 is a 1T storage drive shared with windows full of photos and files I want to keep. I have a 500g storage drive about 1/3 full I assume that is /dev/sde1. I am not sure what /dev/sdc1 is although there is another hard drive on the system with an earlier version of mint, and used for backups.
df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev 8118112 0 8118112 0% /dev
tmpfs 1637972 3228 1634744 1% /run
/dev/sdb1 479668392 454760528 472280 100% /
tmpfs 8189860 148384 8041476 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 8189860 0 8189860 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdd1 976758780 710318868 266439912 73% /mnt/1126BC1778F7CFCD
/dev/sda 488386580 80665728 407720852 17% /mnt/2C395CC72DE20740
tmpfs 1637972 72 1637900 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sde1 463173432 156935620 282640144 36% /media/clemm/c6602673-5c54-426b-b7ba-72844ad8d2cf
/dev/sdc1 486293924 413454860 72839064 86% /media/clemm/6014807414804ECA

[Petermint]

sdb is the drive. sdb1 is partition one on the drive. Your drives appear to all have one big partition which is almost the same.

To make things easier to read, you can name partitions with names like Photos. The addresses suggest they are on SATA cables in a desktop. If you change the cables around, sdb might become sdc, another reason to name partitions. You can name unmounted partitions in Disks. For mounted partitions, boot to a live session then use Disks.

Your home directory must be in / on sdb1. You can make space by moving files from your home directory. You can free space by the things mentioned above, by emptying the trash directory, by deleting thumbnails, a big long list that varies depending on your usage. Do you empty the directories in Thunderbird then compress them? Editors like Bluefish create backups with ~ or a similar indicator. A big spring clean should remove gigabytes.

Then there are all the downloads you used once and no more. You could search for .iso and delete old downloads of Linux. There are ways to remove duplicates. You can configure your backups, Timeshift, Backintime, etc, to use space on one of the other disks.

[rene]

Indeed your Mint install is on /dev/sdb1 as evidenced by the mountpoint /, i.e, root, at the end of the line. We are moreover shown that your /home is not split off as was expected and/because that you in fact have not just 90G but a whopping 500G in use.

Do you perhaps have an enormous amount in your (from normal view hidden) Trash folder? I.e., the "Recycle Bin"? Check by opening the file manager and choosing Trash from the left-hand sidebar (if you rclick it, you can empty it).

If that's not it, I suggest seeing where your disk space went with, for the 20 biggest consumers,

Code: Select all

sudo du -ax / | sort -nr | head -20

By the way; those mountpoints under /mnt and /media/clemm is where the listed parttions are mounted, so you can just look there to see what they hold --- but in this case we're talking about /dev/sdb1 alone indeed, and, yes, it's very full.

[Larry78723]

Please see How to clean Linux Mint Safely for a step-by-step guide to cleaning LM. It states it's for LM20 but is the same for LM19.