Greetings Ubuntu Gurus:

More dumb questions from the Noob gallery :-)

I installed Ubuntu on an older laptop with 20gb hd. It is working great,
however, I have almost filled up the hd. I am not sure what the drive is
filled with although I do know that my var/backup folder has 1.6gb. I
know how this part of my drive filling up happened. I had SimpleBackup
doing a weekly backup of my windoze picture directory. I would be willing
to sacrifice this backup to have more free space as I am currently 91%
full, but I can't figure out how to delete this folder. Ubuntu tells me
that access is denied and that I am not the owner of this folder. So I
guess my question is really a two part:

1.) What is the best way to determine what files are using up my disk
space?

2.) How would I delete my var/backup folder if I decide that it is my
best recourse.

As always, your answer is appreciated.

Thanks,
eMike

Emike was all like, you know, and then said something like a ...

> 1.) What is the best way to determine what files are using up my disk
> space?

Try, as root, do "apt-get autoclean" or "apt-get clean" .
To understand what these commands do read in a terminal the man pages for
apt-get.

>
> 2.) How would I delete my var/backup folder if I decide that it is my
> best recourse.

Just a WAG, but I'll wager root owns that folder.

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:46:51 -0600, BlackTopBum wrote:

> Emike was all like, you know, and then said something like a ...
>
>> 1.) What is the best way to determine what files are using up my disk
>> space?
>
> Try, as root, do "apt-get autoclean" or "apt-get clean" . To understand
> what these commands do read in a terminal the man pages for apt-get.
>>> 2.) How would I delete my var/backup folder if I decide that it is my
>> best recourse.
>
> Just a WAG, but I'll wager root owns that folder.

BlackTopBum,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to a noob once again. I feel like
such a dummy asking some of these questions. I really do know my way
around a M$ machine pretty well, no matter how much of an idiot I seem to
be when using Ubuntu.

You WAGed that root owned the var/backup folder. You were right, but I
didn't know what to do with that information until I looked a little
further. I found that when I used: sudo cd var/backup I would get a cd
command not found. I then tried a sudo rmdir backup and got a directory
not empty error message but at least it was accepting me as "owner". I
eventually discovered that I could use "sudo rm -rf backup" and get rid of
the directory once and for all.

I was surprised to discovered that \backup was actually taking up almost
16gb. I am guessing that this is an artifact of how Simple Backup makes
its incremental backups. The windoze folder that I was backing up was
1.6gb, but somehow SimpleBackup was turning that into 16gb.

I used the autoclean first, but I had already used a synaptic trick that
accomplishes a similiar effect by removing all cached installs. I
appreciate you recommending this nonetheless as it gives me yet another
way to accomplish this task.

Thanks for your help and for pointing me in the right direction.

eMike


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Emike was all like, you know, and then said something like a ...

> Thanks for your help and for pointing me in the right direction.

Thank you - happy to do it. Appreciate you taking time to say so. Seems
you learned several things and likely the most important - which is
obvious by your comments - you know how to find answers.

Emike was all like, you know, and then said something like a ...

> I was surprised to discovered that \backup was actually taking up almost
> 16gb. I am guessing that this is an artifact of how Simple Backup makes
> its incremental backups. The windoze folder that I was backing up was
> 1.6gb, but somehow SimpleBackup was turning that into 16gb.


Been thinking about that backup size - and doing some reading in reference
to sbackup. Then, I recalled having like issues using another backup
method. Like you, the realization to remove OLD backup files for disk
space became obvious. Firstly, I switched to _only_ whole backups each
week of /etc and /boot 'cause I hate doing configs again. Also, limited
which user files from /home were saved weekly to documents, email, data
files - like finance, and anything "deemed important" by that user. The
backup script was ran by cron each week and the files were zipped using
the $DATE variable for naming purposes. Didn't backup to the usual /var
folder, instead sent it all to /backups by category - /backup/boot,
/backup/etc, and /backup/users. Naming would be like

/backup/etc/060507etc.gz (06 - the year, 05 the month, 07 the day)

Used a script to control disk use also - ran by cron - which removed the
backups older than three weeks... which executed *before* the backup would
that day. This kept space used to roughly 3.5G.

I haven't gotten a DVD burner as yet, so I used disk space instead - truly
not the best thing for a single disk system ! It's all I had though and it
allowed for fixing minor user goofs and that occasional screwed up
"upgrade". Admittedly, in July I stopped doing backups after switching
from Gentoo to Ubuntu. Just haven't thought about it - my bad. If you're
interested - and if I can find them - I'll post the scripts here ... *if*
I can find them. Haven't the time to re-learn what I wrote exactly.

On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:11:29 -0600, BlackTopBum wrote:

BlackTopBum offered kindly that:
> If you're interested - and if I can find them - I'll post the scripts
> here ... *if* I can find them. Haven't the time to re-learn what I
> wrote exactly.

I would very much be interested in your script. I appreciate you offering
to share it.

Your description of the script and what it did painted a picture of how
Linux power users really customize and make their system their own. I've
read briefly about chron and I've discovered that bash and python scripts
can both be made executable and tied directly to a chron event. Your
description of your script but it all together for me.

Amazingly powerful tools, freely available to be taken advantage of. I'm
just scratching the surface, but I looked around on the web and found that
there are dozens of sites that offer pre-rolled Python scripts to do just
about anything. Once again, I am really impressed with Linux and Ubuntu
in particular.

Thanks again for your help and the offer.

eMike


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Emike was all like, you know, and then said something like a ...

> I would very much be interested in your script. I appreciate you offering
> to share it.

Hey, check this out - does it all ...

http://reoback.sourceforge.net/

I got it tonight. It's not available via apt-get. Just download the TAR
Ball, extract it to a folder (as root I put the whole extraction in
/reoback), made another folder /backups, then configured the two /conf
files to your liking, plus edit run_reoback.sh and reoback.pl (I edited
these lines:

# Setup paths to archives
$localPath = $config{"localbackup"}."/".$DATESTAMPD."/";
#$remotePath = $config{"remotepath"}."/".$DATESTAMPD."/";
#$nfsPath = $config{"localmount"}."/".$DATESTAMPD."/";

# Remove extra slashes in paths
$localPath =~ s/\/+/\//g;
#$remotePath =~ s/\/+/\//g;
#$nfsPath =~ s/\/+/\//g;

)

Finally, put a script in /etc/cron.daily and enjoy.

Here are my personalized files:
files.conf

# The following is an example with comments, below it is again without

# 'File:' followed by the name of the tar file that will be created
# Note that we don't include a path as that is added in the settings.conf
File: system

# Simply list all directories to be recursively backed up (1 per line)
/boot
/etc
/home

# 'Skip:' followed by any subdirectories you want not to be included
# from the above backup directory

Skip: /home/cmo/Music
Skip: /home/cmo/News
Skip: /home/cmo/wallpaper


and


settings.conf

# Used only as an identifier for this backup. Normally the hostname.
host = codybeau

# This is the number of days you want to keep backups. Note that the
# actual number of archives kept is "backupdays" times 2. That way, when
# it comes time for auto deletion, you always have a history of
# "backupdays" worth of information.
backupdays = 3

# Definitions of files/directories to backup. See README for format of
# this file.
files = /reoback/conf/files.conf

# Directory to store temporary files generated by REOBack.
tmpdir = /var/lib/reoback/tmp/

# Directory to store data files generated by REOBack. Files created
# here are files used to keep track of FULL/INCREMENTAL backups.
datadir = /backups/

# Location of where to keep local backups. Also use as a temporary
# storage of archives for transfer. Keep trailing slash!
localbackup = /backups/

# 1 = Keep local backups, 0 = Do not keep local backups
keeplocalcopy = 1

# 1 = Transfer to remote location, 0 = Do not transfer
remotebackup = 0

HTH !