I feel so bloated
The Bloated Debian question in LXF294 reminded me that I had a similar problem with Linux Mint 20.3, where my separate SSD containing the OS rose to 10GB short of its 120GB capacity, warning me that I was running out of space. Using Disk Usage Analyser, as in your illustration, I found that /var was 80GB and that /var/lib/mlocate was 60GB. Mlocate, as you know, is a database of files used in the locate function of Nemo. It turned out that I was preserving a huge number of mlocate.db.xxxxx files that went back over 18 months. Queried by a forum user, I stated I had not knowingly set up the system to preserve all the historic database files – in fact, I didn’t know that mlocate existed or what it did.
I never found out quite what was going on, although a forum member suggested that something was crashing the current database file before it was completed – when it should have overwritten the
mlocate.db file and therefore was being preserved alongside all the other crashed files. Anyway, I deleted all the database files and then uninstalled mlocate because my /home folder is on a separate SSD and I rarely used the locate function. I’ve found no good reason since to re-install mlocate.
Dr Colin R Lloyd
Neil says…
Thanks for pointing this out. There are some odd default behaviours for log and database files, but I guess you’re damned if you let them expand and you’re damned if you cull them too soon. Like many others, I was scratching my head over a full system disk until I discovered the Systemd command for limiting the log files to a reasonable size of megabytes rather than gigabytes…