How to survive with 32gb emmc hard drive on ubuntu 16.04

[scops]

As time goes by increasing storage usage is leaving me with no hard drive. How do I survive with 32gb emmc hard drive on ubuntu 16.04 64 bit Lenovo n22 80S60001US laptop?
I have a micro sd card which isnt appearing after I come out of suspension.
I tried other linux distros which didnt recognize microsd at all including lubuntu, mint 18 xfce, antergos, lxle.
Help!

 

[Alabalcho]

What's wrong with 32gb of storage? Does it gets eaten, or you are just filling it up with movies?

On my KDE Kubuntu, once in a while a file appears in the home folder eating all space, .xsession-errors.log. I have to reboot in order to get rid of it.

 

[Grobe]

Hi. Does Gparted find your SD card?

 

[scops]

Hi. Does Gparted find your SD card?

hello, yes, gparted finds the sd card but once i close the laptop lid, then open it again/ log back into ubuntu , it does not appear in gparted .

 

[scops]

What's wrong with 32gb of storage? Does it gets eaten, or you are just filling it up with movies?

On my KDE Kubuntu, once in a while a file appears in the home folder eating all space, .xsession-errors.log. I have to reboot in order to get rid of it.

hello, nope, not one movie. in fact, i finally finished moving the entire /home to an external 16gb flash drive but now firefox & opera &gparted are loading much more slowly so i think i'll have to move /home back onto the 32gb emmc but i don't know what i'll do to stop running out of hard drive space.

i searched for .xsession-errors.log but none found.

disks program says: 32gb emmc contains 26gb partition which has 3.1 GB free
whereas there ws less than 1gb free prior to moving /home onto that partition and now /home has 13.75gb more space to use now that it's on the 16gb flash drive.

hopefully, web pages loading, etc will speed up . otherwise, i'll hv to figure another way to configure this so i don't run out of hard drive space what to do ?

 

[hang-the-9]

What are you loading on the drive that is taking up space? Just the OS and even some programs like Open Office will not take up 32gb of space.

And yes moving files to an SD card will be a lot slower than off the local storage.

 

[scops]

What are you loading on the drive that is taking up space? Just the OS and even some programs like Open Office will not take up 32gb of space.

And yes moving files to an SD card will be a lot slower than off the local storage.

thanks. i don't know what is taking up all that space on the hard drive. i use firefox with addons , opera with addons , timeshift (which is set to put backups on the microsd), gparted, libre writer, and not much else other than vlc sometimes. tor browser is still on there,

in trying to get the microsd persistently recognized, techsupport folks have had me sudo apt-get update to Fetch the list of available updates then sudo apt-get upgrade to Strictly upgrade current packages and some other terminal commands.

what are the steps to install new os , like lubuntu , while maintaining /home contents ? i'm thinking i'd keep the /home on the 16gb flash drive as a backup so i'd reformat the primary partition of the 32gb emmc internal hard drive, partition as 22gb for primary partition, 10gb for /home . then, how to copy that /home backup to that 10gb partition so the new lubuntu os sees that mountpoint so programs use those settings and configurations to properly load stuff like the opera addons like lastpass , etc ?

 

[Alabalcho]

Your plan for reinstalling sounds good, to the point of reusing /home. What I do:
- download, prepare bootable USB with new OS
- backup /home just in case
- (re)install while reformatting / partition
- (important) Choose another user name during installation
- boot your new install, add your old user name, restore (if necessary) backup

 

[scops]

Your plan for reinstalling sounds good, to the point of reusing /home. What I do:
- download, prepare bootable USB with new OS
- backup /home just in case
- (re)install while reformatting / partition
- (important) Choose another user name during installation
- boot your new install, add your old user name, restore (if necessary) backup

thanks. hmm.. i'm hesitating on using a new os as i'm concerned about running into problems installing programs that i might not be using now but would need in the future. you know, the program that you almost never use until you really need it. ie: stacer i wish i could just find what is using up all this hard disk space.

how do i backup /home to the 16gb flash drive? i tried using timeshift but it failed.
how do i add my old user name and restore the /home backup ?

 

[Bluesh1ft]

Hello. I have been very familiar with this as my laptop has a 24gb SSD in it and it ran Parrot Security. Your best bet to use the least space is to install Parrot Home. or mint. And once installed remove the majority of the programs that come with it. Delete downloads often. And When you have to install a compiler package remove it after you've finnished "As usually they are a few hundred MB. Also. When the OS is installing choose the custom option and make a very small swap partition. along with a system partition that takes up most of the drive. That'll earn you back some

When installing bootloader install it into the MBR.