How can I free up disk space by removing files that aren't needed?

Question

How can we free disk space by removing unwanted data on the system? How do we detect that the files are not necessary for the programs to work?

Answer 1

I also recommend the same as Jo-Erlend but there is also a little bit of cleaning with the download packages that you already have installed.

For example with the command aptitude or apt-get you can do this:

sudo apt-get clean - Erase downloaded package files
sudo apt-get autoclean - Erase old downloaded package files

sudo aptitude clean - Erase downloaded package files
sudo aptitude autoclean - Erase old downloaded package files

You also have the tool Ubuntu-Tweak:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/next
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak

Then run ubuntu-tweak. It has an option for cleaning up called Janitor:

Lastly you have Bleachbit (Or ChlorineByte ^^) which has several FEATURES which include cleaning the cache from Firefox, Temp files for more than 50 programs and other stuff that is mentioned in the Features page.

The Software Center comes with version 0.8.8 and the Official Page has the 0.9. Whichever you use will do the trick since the difference between version is SMALL.

Answer 2

You can use disk usage analyzer to see what is using space. It is installed by default.

You should not delete things outside of your home directory unless you know what you're doing. Before you delete things, it is a good idea to rename them to see if everything still works. When you know that it does, then you can safely delete them.