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The laptop that I have acquired only came with a 16GB SSD. I installed XFCE onto it and now the SSD is almost completely full. I have an external hard drive with 1TB of memory, and I was wondering if I could move applications over to it instead of having them take up space on my SSD. I would also like to be able to access them, having the SSD inserted into the USB 3.0 slot.

XenoMustache
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  • I think the entire library of Debian software is only ~95GB for every available i386 or amd64 package https://www.debian.org/mirror/size you probably have a LOT more space taken up by non-application data. Use baobab (disk usage analyzer) to see what's where & how big – Xen2050 Jan 10 '15 at 22:42

1 Answers1

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That is not the way Ubuntu/Linux works. Files that make up an applications go to different directories in your root. Binaries go to a bin directory for instance. So moving an "application" to another disk is not really advisable.

16Gb is a LOT of software if that contains just software and not your personal documents. Assuming that 16Gb also contains your personal documents the answer is very easy: move the contents of your folders in /home/$USER/ (ie. ~/Documtents, ~/Downloads, ~/Pictures to that 2nd disk and symlink them from /home/$USER/. That will free up space on your ssd.

Example, discworld is my hdd. / and /home are on an ssd. Disk lay-out (w/o ramdisks):

$ df -H
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5        99G  7,1G   87G   8% /
/dev/sdb6       365G  204G  143G  59% /discworld
/dev/sdb5        25G  2,3G   21G  10% /home

discworld holds my directories:

rinzwind@schijfwereld:~$ ls -l /discworld/
total 64
drwxrwxr-x 8 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 dec 17 15:42 Aptana_Studio_3
drwxrwxr-x 9 rinzwind rinzwind 12288 jan 10 23:05 Desktop
drwxrwxr-x 7 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 dec 17 15:42 Documents
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 jan 10 19:51 Downloads
drwx------ 2 root     root     16384 apr  6  2013 lost+found
drwxrwxr-x 5 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 apr 21  2014 Music
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 jan  4 01:14 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 3 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 jan 10 19:12 Steam
drwxrwxr-x 2 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 apr  6  2013 Templates
drwxrwxr-x 3 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 okt  5 12:10 Videos
drwxr-xr-x 4 rinzwind rinzwind  4096 jan 26  2014 VirtualBox VMs

/home/$USER/

ls -l
total 12
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rinzwind rinzwind   19 okt 11 20:44 Desktop -> /discworld/Desktop/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rinzwind rinzwind   21 okt 11 20:45 Documents -> /discworld/Documents/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rinzwind rinzwind   21 okt 11 20:45 Downloads -> /discworld/Downloads/
-rw-r--r-- 1 rinzwind rinzwind 8980 okt 11 20:40 examples.desktop
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rinzwind rinzwind   20 okt 11 20:45 Pictures -> /discworld/Pictures/

You can mv the directories on /home/$USER/ to your 2nd disks mountpoint/directory. And ln -s ~/Desktop /discworld/Desktop would create the symlink for "Desktop". Do the same for the others and you are set to go.

Rinzwind
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