Running out of disk space?

"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.

Buy at AllPosters.com

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.

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 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 Sourceforge.

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.

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 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.

Disk space in the realm of Terabytes is now commonplace - on the desktop it is not unusual to have half a terabyte, and in less than a decade we may even see petabyte storage (the next big grade after tera is peta), unless all storage goes online.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The title image and CD image come from MorgueFile with permission.

Screen shots have been taken by me on my computer using The Gimp 2, or come from the relevant software systems site.

Hey Webmasters/Lensmasters! - Add hundreds of thousands of images to your site - Free!

Join the AllPosters.com Affiliates Program and get access to hundred of thousands of images for your site. AllPosters.com has images from popular movies, music groups, sports teams, fine art, and much more. Adding these images to your site will enhance your content.

Furthermore, you get paid for improving your site with poster/print images! All of the images you use will link to AllPosters.com where your site visitors can make purchases. When they buy something, AllPosters.com pays you 25% - 30% of the sale. If the visitor decides to purchase within 10 days of their last visit from your website, you'll still earn commission on the sale! It's easy to sign-up, build links, and track your sales.

Sign up today!

My computer at work now has a Terabyte drive, and computers in PC world do. Does this mean that disk space woes are behind us for good, or is it just a matter of time before the requirements of our applications, files and downloads catch up with us?

How Long Before A Terabyte Is Not Enough?

This lens now has some new information on using file compressors as another method to reclaim disk space.