how much space do I really need for Mint partition

[bad medicine]

I currently have an 80 GB partition for Mint 32 bit. I screwed up by installing 32 bit and am going to install 64 bit over the old install. But before I do that I'm wondering how much space I really need on the Linux partition, since I store all my files on a 100GB partition of its own. I also have a W7 partition, and a 320 GB hard drive. That's plenty of space for me for at least a year or two, and I probably don't need 80 GB set aside for Mint. How much of that 80 can I free up while being sure I leave ample space?

[Cosmo.]

20 GB are usually enough, 30 GB very comfortable.

[Reorx]

My current LM17C64 system at my office occupies ~8GB of disk space (not including /home or swap). YMMV!

My usual size recommendation for / (with separate /home) is 25GB.

P.S.: Checked my home machine... Same OS, whole system occupies 32GB of disk space (includes /home but not SWAP).

[austin.texas]

At different times, I have loaded my / partition up with tons of themes, icon sets, downloaded programs, .iso downloads, etc. and at no time did I ever reach 20GB usage.

[bad medicine]

Sounds like I can easily reduce my partition by at least half then, without any worries.

[LinuxJim]

Sounds like I can easily reduce my partition by at least half then, without any worries.

I think so.

Most of my 'current' machines are allocated 50GB, but none of them are more that 1/2 full.

My wife's machine, which has every game known to mankind installed, is barely pushing 30GB.

[gary.zw]

I have mine at 30GB and it is half full.

[AllanPen]

I initially had a 20GB partition for Mint. Then today I got warnings that I was almost out of space suggesting empty trash (did that). Still no room to speak of. I had installed Steam and figured maybe that was the so uninstalled it; sill no room to speak of. So I booted to a USB Mint; loaded Gparted and shrunk my windows partition more and increased the Mint partition to 80GB. Gparted still shows 19.44GB being used. I can't figure this out. I haven't installed any programs of any size.

[slipstick]

I use LM18.3, Cinnamon, 64-bit with 8 GB memory. I have a separate /home and a separate Data partition. I also have my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles (with all e-mail archives) on the Data partition instead of in the /home partition. My current usage:
/ = 9 GB
/home = 1.7 GB (would be 7.63 GB if FF and TBird profiles were on /home)
Data (including FF and TBird profiles) = about 50 GB
swap = very little (currently 29 MB)

[pbear]

Gparted still shows 19.44GB being used. I can't figure this out. I haven't installed any programs of any size.

Timeshift would do this. Copies all the system files (including apps), thus doubling the amount of space used.

If that's the issue and you want to continue using Timeshift but also want to free up the space, you can save snapshots to an external drive. If the external won't always be attached, turn off scheduled snapshots and create manually (e.g., once per week and whenever about to do Level 4 updates).

[AllanPen]

I wasn't using Timeshift at the time. I've just tried it out now. I've been using Linux for many years now and have always used around a 20 to 30GB partition. This is the first time I've encountered this storage warning.