How to get more disk space?
There are a few ways to get more disk space. The first is simply to buy a bigger drive, although you may need to copy your documents over to it and install things on it. The second is to remove unnecessary documents - image files and video files are prime candidates. The third is to start zapping unnecessary programs - there are probably a few, and some take up a lot of space. The fourth and final way is to clean up clogging stuff like temporary files and general fluff that builds up on a drive, rather like pocket lint.
How can you clean up your hard drive? What ways can you quickly claw back space and see which things are hogging most of it?
You have gone to save your document and the dreaded moment of the disk being too full occurs. You may be doing a simple document, or creating a virtual machine disk image, either way, it is no fun at all to suddenly find that there is no space left on your drive.
What to do if you find that there is nothing you would happily delete?
Hopefully, this lens will give you some useful tips to get some free space as soon as possible.
How can you clean up your hard drive? What ways can you quickly claw back space and see which things are hogging most of it?
You have gone to save your document and the dreaded moment of the disk being too full occurs. You may be doing a simple document, or creating a virtual machine disk image, either way, it is no fun at all to suddenly find that there is no space left on your drive.
What to do if you find that there is nothing you would happily delete?
Hopefully, this lens will give you some useful tips to get some free space as soon as possible.
Contents
- Why disk cleaning is important
- Keeping your machine free of viruses
- Baobab - Linux Visual diskspace analysis tool
- WinDirStat - Windows Visual Disk Usage Tool
- Meld - Linux difference viewer
- Winmerge - Free windows merging tool
- Folder Match
- No matter how large disks get this will be a problem for many years
- Do you think storage capacity will ever outstrip demand?
- CCleaner - clean up Windows extra bits
- Disk Cleaning software on Amazon
- Burn a load of things onto a CD/DVD
- A DVD Burner would help...
- FSLint - removing duplicates and cruft in Linux
- Other Linux and Ubuntu Disk Clearing Resources
- Compress your files
- Winzip
- Sometimes you just need more space
- Other tips for sorting out your computer
- Bookmark This Lens
- Reader Feedback
- About Me
- Image Sources
Why disk cleaning is important
"It is important to keep about 5-10% of your disk drives total capacity in reserve..."
If you let your computer disk space become critical, you are in danger of seeing some big problems with your computer.As the disk becomes closer to full, it becomes more fragmented. This means that although you may see 1gb free, that 1gb is basically in the gaps between many files and the computer has to work much harder to store and retrieve files that are spread across many segments. This will make a computer very, very slow.
Worse still, a defragmenter requires a certain amount of diskspace even to work, so you will not be able to defragment until you have regained space.
Windows generally requires a swap file for virtual memory on the same drive as the windows installation. Chances are that your computer is configured with only one partition. If you have a variable size swap file, then when you run out of space Windows will also no longer be able to swap.
Furthermore, when programs start to run, including startup programs on Windows or Linux (and probably Mac), they may need to write temporary files and little working files as they start up - if they find they cannot, this may prevent programs, and even the operating system from working properly.
It is important to keep about 5-10% of your disk drives total capacity in reserve, as 100% use will result in the worst possible case of all of the above.
Keeping your machine free of viruses
A computer virus can rapidly eat up disk space. Many different and unpleasant kinds of malware (bad software) can clog up a drive, or make a machine very slow. They sometimes are equipped with systems that actively prevent you from deleting (or even detecting) them.
Malware may deliberately clog you drive space, or override statistics so you can not reliable tell the size of your drive. While antivirus software may in itself use drive space on your computer, it is better to reduce the risk of viruses that may use much more of it.
Malware may deliberately clog you drive space, or override statistics so you can not reliable tell the size of your drive. While antivirus software may in itself use drive space on your computer, it is better to reduce the risk of viruses that may use much more of it.
Baobab - Linux Visual diskspace analysis tool
Baobab is free software for Linux which gives a very visual display of disk space usage. It sits in gnome under the simple title of "Disk Usage Analyzer" and is part of the "gnome-utils" package which is a standard desktop package.The basic presentation is a navigable tree of folders and files with those using the most space sorted to the top and the usage displayed beside them.
Baobab can graphically display disk usage with concentric circles in a kind of pie chart - a ring chart, with the largest folders and files taking up the largest segment.
This tool allows a user to quickly see which files are using up either the entire filesystem or a users home directory.
It is not perfect, with major flaws being that files are moved to trash and not deleted when a user deletes them inside the app, and that it is not aware of fuse mounted file systems (a fairly new concept in Linux) so will index them too.
A user of this is strongly advised to unmount any fuse filesystems in the index area before running Baobab, otherwise you may find yourself waiting a long time while it indexes the mounted drive - especially if that is a network drive.
To install Baobab on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install gnome-utils
Baobab is now part of the gnome-utils package. Installing this is not enough for it to appear in the menu. To ensure there is a menu icon, right click on the Applications menu, click on accessories, then Add Item. Name it Baobab, and set the command to /usr/bin/baobab. It is now ready to run.
WinDirStat - Windows Visual Disk Usage Tool
WinDirStat is a free windows tool to display disk usage graphically.It displays the disk usage with a navigable tree with the largest items near the top, the usage displayed and a block graph, where the largest portions represent the largest files.
You can rapidly zero in on which files or folders are using the most space, and delete or open them from within WinDirStat.
It can be downloaded for free from Windirstat.info.
It will take some time to index a drive, but it is pretty accurate. It also uses a cute motif of a Pacman to show areas where it is still working.
Downsides: This can be a slow tool.
Meld - Linux difference viewer
If you have two folders you strongly suspect to be the same, but dare not delete one just in case, then Meld is a great tool to visually see the difference. It will be in most standard Linux repositories and is a Gnome based app.It shows trees of files and folders side by side, highlighting which only occur on one side, or if they are different. Double clicking on text files will allow you to quickly see the text differences on screen.
One way to use this most effectively is to nominate one copy as the master. Then on the other copy, delete anything that it has marked as being the same. You can then reconcile differences by hand.
Downsides: Although it will show which files other than text are different, you cannot then actually compare what is different in those files. This is most notable in MP3 collections, where the likely difference is the ID3 tags - what I would love is a tool with an option to ignore ID3 tags.
Winmerge - Free windows merging tool
Winmerge can be used to see the differences between two folders or files side by side. If you have two very similar look folders this is the perfect tool for whittling down the differences to just one folder.As with Meld, my technique here is to take one folder as primary and another as secondary, and delete everything that is duplicated from the secondary and keep it on the primary. Any folders the secondary has that the primary does not, move to the primary folder. Eventually you will come down to file differences, where you may either merge them (if they are text) or move one to a versioned file in the master folder structure.
Downsides: This tool is very programmer oriented. It will show folder differences quite clearly.
Folder Match
While all these tools are free, you would need to download many different tools and while all usable (I use them) you may find that their user interfaces are not as pretty as you would like.
For a more easy, complete and integrated solution why not give FolderMatch a go.
It is (sorry) only for the Windows users reading this.
It is considered good enough to be displayed on Microsofts own Shareware hall of Fame.
For a more easy, complete and integrated solution why not give FolderMatch a go.
It is (sorry) only for the Windows users reading this.
It is considered good enough to be displayed on Microsofts own Shareware hall of Fame.
FolderMatch - Backup Your Files or Hard Drive, Protect Your Data, Compare and Synchronize Folders on Your Computer (Windows Software)
Amazon Price: $35.00 (as of 11/12/2009)
No matter how large disks get this will be a problem for many years
Disk space in the realm of Terabytes is now less than a year or 2 away - on the desktop it is not unusual to have quarter or even half a terabyte, and soon after that, we may even see petabyte storage (the next big grade after tera is peta).
However, as disk space increases, applications will grow to fill it, as music, high quality video, photo-realistic games and other applications have done so now.
There will be new uses for computers and storage which may seem today to be limitless will one day still have people scrabbling around to reclaim the wasted space. Consider this - less than 20 years ago, 320Gb was completely unthinkable. Even the supercomputers of the time are extremely unlikely to have this kind of storage, and I can buy it fairly cheaply today on Amazon. I could easily fill it up in days if doing video manipulation or recording HD video streams.
Applications that will use a lot of disk space are often conceived before such capacity is available, though I think experience has taught us that this is no good reason to shelve a project (perhaps it is time to patent it for when it is feasible).
Bill Gates has been rumoured to have said "640k should be enough for anyone" in 1981. IBM similarly thought that a few large mainframes would be enough computers for a whole population. Since then, I think such predictions have been avoided.
However, as disk space increases, applications will grow to fill it, as music, high quality video, photo-realistic games and other applications have done so now.
There will be new uses for computers and storage which may seem today to be limitless will one day still have people scrabbling around to reclaim the wasted space. Consider this - less than 20 years ago, 320Gb was completely unthinkable. Even the supercomputers of the time are extremely unlikely to have this kind of storage, and I can buy it fairly cheaply today on Amazon. I could easily fill it up in days if doing video manipulation or recording HD video streams.
Applications that will use a lot of disk space are often conceived before such capacity is available, though I think experience has taught us that this is no good reason to shelve a project (perhaps it is time to patent it for when it is feasible).
Bill Gates has been rumoured to have said "640k should be enough for anyone" in 1981. IBM similarly thought that a few large mainframes would be enough computers for a whole population. Since then, I think such predictions have been avoided.
Do you think storage capacity will ever outstrip demand?
Storage capacity seems to be growing at an exponential rate. However, as noted above so do our needs.
Do you think perhaps our needs will level off and storage will become ample?
Or perhaps do you think needs will grow in a similar exponential fashion?
Will disk capacity always never be quite enough?
Fetching blurbs now... please stand byYes this will always be a problem because...
poddys says:
As disk space gets bigger, so do the files, in type and size. The need to keep a tidy HD never goes away. It's like life, doesn't matter if you live in a 1 room apartment or an 18 room mansion, both need to be kept tidy, otherwise they fill up. Move to a bigger house, and things are ok for a while, but clutter always adds up.
Posted August 18, 2009
Sir B. Tonne. says:
People are stupid and easily tricked into buying more crap.
This will be true of computer storage.
I mean, we have so much crap these days that an industry has arisen (big yellow, etc) that stores your excess crap! And yet people keep on accumulating more and more!
Our psychology will have to change a lot before we are actually happy with what we have. On all sides are companies and marketing men talling us to buy more shite, its hard to ignore them.
Posted May 14, 2009
dannystaple says:
Video is still emerging as a mainstream thing for computers, before limited to high end users. When that is common (which it is fast becoming), the next big thing (3d films? Full on video blogging? something else) will require a huge chunk of storage space.
Posted May 12, 2009
No this will change because...
Megalev says:
1 thing:
Now PC world (i.e. you can get cheaper / better) does a half decent 500gig drive for £50 - 10p a gig. This is only going to get cheaper.
Is anyone really complaining about that? I think we all used to struggle 10 years ago. Isn't that way now.
Posted May 12, 2009
CCleaner - clean up Windows extra bits
A computer stores lots of bits of rubbish (I like to call it cruft) all over the filesystem.These things are temporary files, caches, useless cookies, old internet files, windows upgrade leftovers and plenty more similar rubbish. While each item is generally small, they quickly add up to tens of gigabytes.
Learning where these are, routing them out and deleting them would take a very long time, longer than I have for sure. This tool quickly finds them, explains what they are (if you wish), gives you options to include/exclude things, and then lets you wipe them out.
It also has an additional interface to remove programs and windows components.
CCleaner can be downloaded from CCleaner.com for free.
Disk Cleaning software on Amazon
While the free tools will get you well on your way, if you are happy to spend money to sort it out, then go get yourself some disk cleaning software.
Wipe It Data Deletion Software
Amazon Price: (as of 11/12/2009)
Burn a load of things onto a CD/DVD
One way to free up space is to group up stuff, and burn chunks of it off onto CDs or DVDs. Things that you do not refer to often, like photo albums, are ideal for this.However, if they are really important, make more than one copy.
You should be backing up anything important onto a CD/DVD as a matter of course, as hard drives do fail, it is a matter of when and not if.
Once you have it on CD, put that in a safe place and delete it from the computer hard drive. Considering you can put 650Mb on a CD and 4.5Gb on a DVD, you can move chunks of stuff off easing the pressure.
A DVD Burner would help...
Fetching new data from eBay now... please stand by
FSLint - removing duplicates and cruft in Linux
FSLint is another tool easily installed on most Linux distributions - Ubuntu certainly has it in the repositories.FSLint will detect duplicates, temp files, cache files and other useless items. It offers even to strip binaries - which I advise against unless you know what this means.
The thing that is really important here is duplicate files - this will find them, and allow a user to get an overview of potential duplicates, and mark one of them for deletion. When combined with the folder comparison techniques for Meld, this will mean you can rapidly get down to only one copy of those files.
Find out more about FSLint - FSLint home.
Downside:
It will not consider MP3's differing only in play count as duplicates - this is not something I would expect it to do, but it limits usefulness with a music collection.
Alternatives:
Kleansweep has similar functionality, but is KDE based. It has a somewhat harder to use interface than FSLint though.
Other Linux and Ubuntu Disk Clearing Resources
There are plenty of other sites with good reference material for getting this job done. These are also worth trying.
- Delete Unnecessary Files From Your Desktop With BleachBit On Ubuntu 9.04 | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
- Delete Unnecessary Files From Your Desktop With BleachBit On Ubuntu 9.04.
If you are used to CCleaner in windows, Bleachbit in Linux is for you. It also offers to flood fill files before removing them, which helps in privacy too. It is also part of the Ubuntu repositories so is very easy to install. Read this guide for info on installing BleachBit.
Compress your files
It is inevitable that there may be some files you want to keep, but don't use often. For these you can use compression.
Compression uses mathematical rules to store the same information in a smaller space. There are two major types of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless means that the original information will all be preserved. Lossy means that some information will be simplified.
This section will focus on lossless compression.
Windows Compressors
For windows, you can normally compress using Zip files. You can take a directory of files, and generally store them in less space than the originals. Text and word documents compress particularly well.
Recommended tools: Winzip, 7zip.
Windows XP and Vista have a built in tool to work with zip files, but they are a little slower and less reliable than using Winzip or 7zip.
Linux (including Ubuntu) compressors
7zip can also be used on Linux. The most common format is tar.gz - where a number of files are placed in one archive, and then that is gzipped into a smaller space. The resulting tar-gzip file is sometimes called a "tarball" in Linux circles.
Also bzip files are seen - bzip is another compression wrapper often used around a tar file.
Compression uses mathematical rules to store the same information in a smaller space. There are two major types of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless means that the original information will all be preserved. Lossy means that some information will be simplified.
This section will focus on lossless compression.
Windows Compressors
For windows, you can normally compress using Zip files. You can take a directory of files, and generally store them in less space than the originals. Text and word documents compress particularly well.
Recommended tools: Winzip, 7zip.
Windows XP and Vista have a built in tool to work with zip files, but they are a little slower and less reliable than using Winzip or 7zip.
Linux (including Ubuntu) compressors
7zip can also be used on Linux. The most common format is tar.gz - where a number of files are placed in one archive, and then that is gzipped into a smaller space. The resulting tar-gzip file is sometimes called a "tarball" in Linux circles.
Also bzip files are seen - bzip is another compression wrapper often used around a tar file.
Winzip
WinZip 12 Standard (Single User)
Amazon Price: $37.99 (as of 11/12/2009)
WinZip 12 Professional (Single User)
Amazon Price: $56.99 (as of 11/12/2009)
Sometimes you just need more space
When you have tried everything, or there are just no more files you care to clean away, it is time for more disk space. Buying a hard drive is definitely the next step. Just try to think about your needs before you do!
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- dannystaple dannystaple Aug 18, 2009 @ 3:25 pm | in reply to poddys
- Did you see the drive docks? Those are a neat way to back up.
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- poddys poddys Aug 18, 2009 @ 2:21 pm
- Very useful information. 5*****. Keeping a clean and tidy HD is always a good idea. If you have a desktop with space for a 2nd HD, you can buy a bigger HD for data and then use the original just for the system and programs. Also, in the USA a 1gb external HD is now available for under $100 from various sources (Buy.com, Tiger Direct, CompUSA, New Egg etc). Great for all those videos and MP3's, as well as for backup copies.
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- tdove tdove Mar 16, 2009 @ 4:11 pm
- Thanks for joining G Rated Lense Factory!
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