BleachBit stopped working?

HI there,
I used Bleachbit and started and overview and a clean up but after a while it froze and I eded up with only 16 GB of free disk space. Any suggestions ?

The problem has been resolved, however which disk space cleaner would you recommend for Fedora ?

@fedoranewbie
Of course there are always possibilities to get rid of some unneeded files or so. But I don’t think you have a need for such a tool on Fedora as you have it on Windows.

In general,

  • have your browser cache in mind (Firefox or whatever) when you want to release some space.
  • and delete the journalctl from time to time (but always keep the recent few days!); e.g. journalctl --vacuum-time=2d (this keeps the last two days of logs)
  • remove unneeded packages when no longer needed; e.g., after upgrades, see https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-upgrade/ which contains some sections about cleaning up old packages.
  • keep tracking your own packages! E.g., drivers or other stuff, which you install manually and that is thus not included in dnf/rpm cleanups (I don’t think clean up tools would do to this for you); best practice would be of course to not do this at all.

These are major cleanup issues and I assume that a cleanup tool does not make a difference for most of that (maybe for the browser cache but not much more).

I assume current installations on Fedora keep their /tmp dir as a tmpfs, which means that you do not need to clean it up (its only a temporary file system on your memory, physically deleted as soon as your machine is shutdown). However, I have no fresh installation of 35 at my place, so I don’t know for sure, but you can check it with cat /etc/fstab | grep tmp. The output should contain tmpfs /tmp tmpfs ... ... ...

The remaining is your home directory and var. We had a issue that is maybe interesting for you as well some weeks ago: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/var-is-full-update-problem/60764

In var, you should be careful, and I would not allow any tool to make an automated cleanup within (especially not with root privileges, which it would require for much in /var). The files there have usually a purpose. If there is really something big inside where you don’t think it is needed, invesetigate it rather than just delete it…

For home, you can check yourself, beginning with ls -la ~ and deleting .softwareName (beginning with .) of tools you have no longer installed (e.g., if you used to use klamav but not anylonger, then you could delete ~/.klamav). However, usually (although not always), there are just a few configs in these folders.

If you want to cleanup more in /home, it can make sense to stick with a tool like BleachBit if you want to get rid of more without checking folders like .cache on yourself, although I have not used something like that myself (but I like that BleachBit is part of the Fedora repo and nothing external). The good thing here is that it does not need root privileges or such. Does your BleachBit problem persists when you use it only in /home?

If privacy is an issue for you, feel free to also delete the content (or some of it) of ~/.bash_history from time to time.

When you want to wipe a whole disc so that all content of the disc cannot be restored, stick with the good old tools: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda where /dev/sda is the disc (or partition, like sda1) you want to wipe. I sometimes use if=/dev/random instead or strongly decrease the bs (e.g., the default is 512 bytes) in order to slow down the process (such a procedure is always a big imposition for the disc; especially if you do this with a traditional HDD).

2 Likes

Thank you @py0xc3, that was what I needed.