With Baobab, you can analyze what folders eat up your disk capacity the most then show the result in an user-friendly table. You can choose whether to examine Home folder only, or the whole Root System, or any specific partition/external disk, or even a specific folder. Baobab's analysis process is very quick and easy to do. You can do the examination in Ubuntu and also Trisquel (however, the Trisquel's Baobab is MATE Disk Usage Analyzer).
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Running the Analyzer
- Ubuntu & Trisquel: go to desktop menu > type "disk usage analyzer" > the icon showing > run it.
- Using Terminal in Ubuntu: type the command: baobab
- Using Terminal in Trisquel: type the command: mate-disk-usage-analyzer
1. Examine $HOME Folder
Press "Home" icon and wait Analyzer to analyze all folders. Once finished, it shows list of folders with the largest one on top. For example, at picture below, my "Downloads" folder which took 7GB, is the largest folder in my $HOME directory. Second place is taken by my "Public" folder for 1.8GB. Third place is taken by my ".cache" folder for 370MB. You can examine each result by clicking the black-triangle to see deeper.
TIP: you should question why one of your folders took suspiciously large space and inspect the files inside of it. Try to find .iso or .zip or .mp4 files that are often caused huge space usage.
2. Examine a Specific Folder
Press "Folder" button > a dialog showing > choose a folder (e.g. Documents) > press Open button > let the Analyzer analyzing.
3. Examine Whole System Partition
Press "Hard Disk" button > let the Analyzer analyzing. Once finished, you get all folders inside the / partition with the largest one on top. For example, at picture below, my "/home", "/usr", and "/var" folders are the biggest three for 10GB, 4.5GB, and 1.3GB respectively.
4. Examine A Partition
To examine a partition, first you should open ("mount") that partition, so use your file manager to open a partition.
Press "Folder" button > a dialog showing > select a partition name* > press Open button > let the Analyzer analyzing. Once finished, you can see the largest folder on top. For example, at picture below, my folder "repositorialldeb-bengkelubuntuorg" is the largest one for 12GB. Second place is taken by "alldeb-xenial-amd64" folder for 6GB. And third place is taken by "iso" folder for 5GB.
*) you may be asked to enter password at Trisquel and Fedora.
5. Examine a Whole External HDD
To examine all partitions inside an External HDD, you must know in what folder all partitions being mounted, for example in /media for Ubuntu and in /run for Fedora.
Eject all mounted partitions > insert your External HDD > make sure all HDD's partitions being mounted > Press "Folder" button > a dialog showing > navigate to /media/{username}/ > press Open button > let the Analyzer analyzing. Once finished you see the largest partition on top of the list.
For example, at picture below, my External HDD is WDC WD32 and its largest partition is "gudang" for 141GB. Second place is taken by "gudang2" partition for 20GB and third place by "fedora" partition for 19GB.
6. Examine a Partition inside an External HDD
Similar to previous section, you still need to know where your system puts the mounted partitions. In Ubuntu it should be in /media and in Fedora it should be in /run.
Eject all mounted partitions > insert your External HDD > make sure the partition you want is already mounted > open up the Analyzer > press "Folder" button > navigate to /media/{username}/{partition_name}/ > press Open > let the Analyzer analyzing. Once finished, you should see the largest folder of that partition is on top of the list.
For example, at picture below, I examine my "kubuntu" partition and I find that "/home" is the largest folder for 5GB.
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