Reclaim disk space

[Loki]

If you’ve had your phone for a while now and haven’t done a clean install or re-flashed the OS recently, there’s a good chance you can reclaim a significant amount of disk space by hoovering up the journal logs.

From the terminal you can see how much disk space the journal logs are currently occupying with…

sudo journalctl --disk-usage

Having just checked with a friends phone who re-flashed Amber approx 5 months ago, they had around 4GB worth of journal log files.

Before you can hoover them, you need to rotate the logs to archive them…

sudo journalctl --flush --rotate

If you need/want to have a clear out, you can clear them by time, file count or size.

To clear out by time, for example to keep the last 3 days of logs and clear everything else…

 sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=3d

To clear out by files count, for example to keep the last 5 log files and clear everything else…

sudo journalctl --vacuum-files=5

To clear out by size, for example to keep the last 200 MB of logs and clear out everything else…

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=200M

You should be able to combine the rotate with the vacuum, for example to flush and hoover everything except the logs of the last week…

sudo journalctl --flush --rotate --vacuum-time=1w

For me, I only check the logs for reproducible problems, so I have disabled journal logging for day to day and only enable it when I need/want to check for info/detail of a problem.

[tracy]

Before it came with all O/S, reminds me of the days of DOS and Windows 3.1. I think it was Norton that offered a disc data optimizer (to speed up loading your programs!). Depending on how messy it was, it could run for a long time.

The graphics were fun to watch, as they used whole colored characters to represent disc sectors. You could hypotize yourself watching the letters rearrange themselves on the screen.

[Gavaudan]

@tracy

The graphics were fun to watch, as they used whole colored characters to represent disc sectors. You could hypotize yourself watching the letters rearrange themselves on the screen.

Hahaha I used to be mildly mesmerized by that as a kid.

[SteveA]

Thanks for the tip. I actually hadn’t done that in the 8+ years that I’ve owned my System76 Ubuntu laptop so I just reclaimed 2G and will be keeping that in my notes. Thanks!

[irvinewade]

@Loki

sudo journalctl ...

I suggest making that permanent and automatic. Or at least that’s what I have done. /etc/systemd/journald.conf

[JCS]

Apologies for the necro, but to clarify, the modification to /etc/systemd/journald.conf to limit the maximum size of the journald logs is as follows.

As root, modify the file to uncomment

#SystemMaxUse=

and set a max threshhold in MB (M), GB (G), etc.

SystemMaxUse=512M

Save the file and restart the journald service.

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald.service

Source

[irvinewade]

See also Tips & Tricks · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab

[Jim]

This is what a distribution (PureOS, Debian) should do - set the defaults that most users want and let the minority make changes. Not to mention that devs and maintainers should know better than most of their users to select good defaults.

[JCS]

I agree. These are settings I feel would best benefit users to bake in as defaults. Losing 10% of internal storage to a journal log is excessive and, if my parents hypothetically picked up a Librem 5, I wouldn’t expect to have to inform them to modify a system file to avoid log bloat.

[raenrfm]

Yes I’m an old head too that remembers this feeding my ocd.

[Rhodez-x]

I also have issues with disk space as I mentioned here (focused on the boot partition):

Low space on boot

I know that OP ask something specific, but my L5 also says low disc space, both on rootfs and boot. I have a very hard time to get enough space especially on boot. Is there a go-to solution for this? I might have experienced this in the beginning, but I cannot recall what I did to solve it. Edit: Well, somehow “sudo apt autoremove” just solved my issue for now so I managed to get the phone up to date. However, I’m still interested what others experience.

I just followed what @JCS wrote. My journalctl was taking up 2.3GB and I now limited to 512M, hence freeing up almost 2G.

@JCS

Apologies for the necro, but to clarify, the modification to /etc/systemd/journald.conf to limit the maximum size of the journald logs is as follows.

As root, modify the file to uncomment

#SystemMaxUse=

and set a max threshhold in MB (M), GB (G), etc.

SystemMaxUse=512M

Save the file and restart the journald service.

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald.service

Source

[Tonyp]

Other way to recover files is deleting .dng files on Pictures.
If you have taken photos with Librem 5 you will have two files for each photo taken: one .jpg file around ~700kb
one .dng file around 13000Kb.

rm ~/Pictures/*.dng

I recovered 1.5gb just now

[dos]

…but remember that these DNG files contain a much higher quality image than what you see in JPEGs coming from the default camera pipeline which is simple and fast rather than good looking, and you can use these DNG files to get better JPEGs afterwards (see Glowup for an example of this, and more photos here).

So if you care about these photos, you may want to archive them somewhere instead of deleting. They should compress fairly well too.

(replies to this got split into a separate thread, so go there if you want to reply)