Make Tech Easier » Clean up

Clean Up And Regain Your Disk Space With Bleachbit

Damien — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:22:39 +0000

If you are wondering why your hard disk space is getting lesser and lesser and yet you did not install that many applications on your system, most probably you are wasting your disk space on the cache and temporary files.

BleachBit is a software for Linux that scans your computer and deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It supports a wide variety of applications and is able to rid your system of old clutter like cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts.

Download the Bleachbit installer for your distro. If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you can install it directly from the repository.

Once you have installed Bleachbit, go to Applications->System Tools. You will see two options: Bleachbit and Bleachbit as Administrator. As its name implies, opening Bleachbit as Administrator allows you to clean up and delete files from the system folder.

The left pane of the Bleachbit window shows the list of applications that it supports. Put a check on those applications that you want to clean up (Cleaning up doesn’t mean uninstallation, it only deletes the cache files created by the applications). Click on the Preview button to see the files that will be deleted. You can also scroll down to the end of the list to see the amount of disk space it going to free up once all the cache/temporary files are deleted.

Once you are done with the preview, click on the Delete button to wipe out all the cache files.

That’s it.

Clean Up And Regain Your Disk Space With Bleachbit originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Identify Duplicate Files And Delete It With Utmost Care In Windows

fasil — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:57:15 +0000

If you are wondering why your hard disk is always running out of space, it could be that you have stored (unknowingly) plenty of the same files in different names, folders and drives. While we all know that it is important to get rid of these unwanted duplicated files, it can be an arduous task to hunt them down and keep rid of them. Luckily, there is this tiny tool – Double Killer, to make this task much easier.

Double Killer is software that allows you to identify duplicate files (files of same content) and delete them with extreme care. Why do I highlight the term with extreme care? The reason for this is Double Killer checks CRC-32 values of every file and make sure that the file is an exact duplicate before it proceeds to remove it. For your info, the CRC-32 value of a file is like the finger print for the file and is regularly used as an important criteria to identify files of the same content.

To illustrate, let’s say I have a folder named ‘E-books‘ in different partitions drive and I am going to use Double killer to identify duplicate files.

1. Download the Double killer from this site.

2. Unzip the zipped file and double click the DoubleKiller.exe file to execute it.

3. Go to ‘Options‘ tab and set the search criteria. It is important to exclude the system files and any files with extension.

4. Add the directories where you want to search for duplicate files. In our case, I have to select two folder named “E-books” from different drives such as D:\ and E:\

5. Once the required directories are added, click on ‘Run‘ button to start the search for duplicated files

6. Double Killer will then return results for files that have the same CRC check sums and list them based on criteria like size, date modified and CRC value.

7. You can now delete the duplicated files using the Delete options provided in Double Killer. To delete all duplicate entry, click on the ‘Check the last dupes‘ button.

8. Once Delete files in clicked all duplicates files will be deleted and ensure the CRC-32 value for files to safely delete.

Note: On some rare cases, you may see ‘0000000′ in the CRC value (as seen in the screenshot above). In such incident, the application is not able to figure out the CRC value of the files for some reason. You may want to check manually if those files are duplicates and remove them from your hard disk.

That’s it. You should now have a cleaner hard disk with little or no duplicate files in your system.

What other software do you use to clean up your system?

How To Identify Duplicate Files And Delete It With Utmost Care In Windows originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

8 Ways to Maintain a Clean, Lean Ubuntu Machine

Damien — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:31:42 +0000

Once in a while, you may want to do some maintenance on your Ubuntu machine and clean up unnecessary files that are chunking up large storage space in your hard disk.

Here are 8 ways that you can use to clean up your Ubuntu:

1) Analyze your disk usage

The first thing that you need to do is to find out which files are consuming the large bulk of the storage space in your hard disk. Go to Applications->Accessories->Disk Usage Analyzer and click on the Scan Filesystem at the top to get it to analyze your disk usage pattern. You will be able to see instantly which files/folders are taking up the bulk.

Once you have determined the files that are taking up large storage space, you can do the following:

decide if you have any use of the files. If not, send them to the trash.
If you have no immediate use of the file, but will need to reference to it in the future, either backup to a CD/DVD or to an external hard disk. If the file is too big, you may want to compress and split it to several small files for easier storage.

2) Clear duplicate files and broken symlinks

Over the time, you could have dozen copy of the same file lying in different corners of your system. The best place is to hunt them down and eliminate them before they take control of the hard disk.

FSlint is a utility to find and clean various forms of lint on a filesystem, especially duplicate files and broken symlinks.

Install fslint, or via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install fslint

Go to Applications-> System Tools-> FSlint. Add the file path that you want to search. On the left, click on the Duplicate tab and click Find at the bottom.

Other than finding duplicate files, FSlint can also find broken symlinks, empty directories, bad IDs and even redundant temp files, all of which you can delete and recover back your precious disk space.

3) Clean up your package installation

If you have installed and uninstalled a lot of applications, chances are your system is infected with a lot of dependencies files that you have absolutely no use for. Here are some useful commands to get rid of any partial package and remove any unused dependencies:

Cleaning up of partial package:

sudo apt-get autoclean

Cleaning up of the apt cache:

sudo apt-get clean

Cleaning up of any unused dependencies:

sudo apt-get autoremove

A good practice to avoid any left behind is to use the autoremove command whenever you want to uninstall an application.

sudo apt-get autoremove application-name

4) Get rid of old residual config package

When you upgrade a software to a later version, the package of its previous version will still be left behind in the system. You will be able to free up some space by eliminating the old residual config package

Open up your Synaptic Package Manager (System-> Administration-> Synaptic Package Manager). On the left, click on the Status button. You will see a few options appear on the top left pane. If there is a Not Installed (residual config) option, click on it. This will reveal all the residual config package in the system.

Check the box beside the package and select “Mark for complete removal”. Click Apply.

5) Remove orphaned package

Other than the dependencies files, packages can also become orphaned when you uninstall an application. To get rid of orphan files, we can make use of gtkorphan, a graphical frontend for deborphan.

Install gtkorphan or via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install gtkorphan

Go to System-> Administration-> Removed Orphaned package

It will analyze the system and show all the orphaned package in the main window. Check those packages that you have no use for and uninstall them.

6) Keep track of what you have installed

Debfoster creates a dependency files to enable you to keep track of what you have installed. When you uninstall an application, it will check for any leave behind dependencies files or orphaned packages and ask you if you want to remove it.

Install debfoster, or via the terminal,

sudo apt-get install debfoster

Creating the initial keeper file:

sudo debfoster -q

Force the system to conform to the keeper file

sudo debfoster -f

If you have some packages that you never want to uninstall and do not want debfoster to handle those packages, you can edit the keeper file and remove those packages from the list.

gksu gedit /var/lib/debfoster/keepers

To see is there is any orphaned package or dependencies files that need to be removed:

sudo debfoster

7) remove locale files

Unless you have a need to switch to various locales all the time, you can uninstall the unused locales and free up some amount of the storage space in your system.

Install localepurge, or via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install localepurge

Once the installation is done, it will remove all locale files from your system that you have no need for.

8) Clean up grub menu (only for those who know what they are doing)

Sometime when you perform an update, you will find that the kernel is being upgraded to new one while the old one still remain. If you don’t like to see a long list of entries in your grub menu when you boot up the computer, here is a simple way to clean up the grub menu.

Go to terminal and type

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Search for the following lines:

Remove the entry that you have no need for. Save and exit.

Rather than editing the menu.lst file which can be a scary task for newbies, an easier and better way to cleanup the grub menu is via Startup Manager or SUM in short.

Install SUM or in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Go to System-> Administration-> Startup-Manager

In the Boot Option tab, under the Default Operating System field, pick the kernel that you want to use.

Click on the Advanced tab, check the box Limit the number of kernel in the boot menu. In the Number of kernels to keep field, enter 1

Close the window.

You should see a cleanup grub menu the next time you boot up.

Is there any ways that I have missed out? How do you clean up your Ubuntu machine?

8 Ways to Maintain a Clean, Lean Ubuntu Machine originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)