Re: Erase cache, clean registry in Linux
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 02:35:22PM -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote:
> 350 MB? I have not cleaned my thumbnails since early 2007 or so
> and I had 1.6 GB.
You probably have been using applications that create thumbnails more
than I did. I'm using some gnome applications, but I'm not using
gnome ...
> And my /home disk is only 120 GB, but I still don't care. I would
> care if my ~ is messy, but XDG standards are starting to fix that.
Well, my data goes back about 10 to 15 years, and I'm at 117GB atm. I
spent most of the day yesterday to clean it up and sort some things
out, and that reduced it from 120GB to 117. I still haven't figured
out what takes up so much space ...
> But I don't care if large amounts of data are stored as long as it
> is in one logical place, where I can see it and control it if I want
> to, and it is serving some purpose.
The problem is to keep it maintained. It's enough already to keep
maintained what data I've put there myself --- which is one logical
place, i. e. my home directory and its subdirectories, nicely
organized. I don't need applications creating large amounts of data by
themselfes without telling me and even hiding the fact from me.
> > As to setting up cron jobs to automatically delete data, I'm very
> > reluctant to do that. If something goes wrong, the job might delete
> > data I don't want it to delete. Something as simple as filenames
> > containing spaces can already make it go horribly wrong.
>
> I suppose, although nothing under .thumbnails should have a space
> or anything like that.
I don't even know which programs put data there --- if I knew, I could
avoid using them or delete the data after using them. Since I don't
know, I have no way of telling what data might be put there and what
filenames might be used --- and there is always the possibility that a
program has a bug which leads it to create files with names that have
spaces or other characters that better not be used in filenames.
Besides, the date stamps on files change way too easily to use them as
an indicator for the age of a file. I've copied my data many times
from one disk to another when I got new disks or moved it from one
directory to another or from one partition to another or used
different file systems and whatever. A file that is 15 years old can
eventually have a date stamp saying it's from today --- and that a
file is 15 years old doesn't say anything about wanting to keep it or
not, other than that I probably want to keep it because if not, I'd
have already deleted it.
Standards are not going to fix the problem --- it seems more like they
create the problem in the first place. I want to keep in control of my
data, and any standard that supports taking my data out of my control
in any way is a very bad thing.
> But if, as you say, you haven't used 99.99% of the thumbnails in
> more than two years, then if you delete it once, it should take more
> than two years before more than a megabyte or two of thumbnails are
> added back in.
Maybe, maybe not --- that doesn't change the fact that I don't want
these thumbnails, that I don't even know how they get there and that
control over my data has been taken out of my hands that way.
Having that said, I should file a bug report against all programs
creating thumbnails without my knowledge and consent, no matter if
there is a standard for doing that or not.
If you think of the OP: Do you want to have similar problems windoze
users have with the system messing itself up over time? If Linux would
do that, I would have to look for something else to use because I
couldn't trust it with my data anymore and because of the
unreliability and uncertainties resulting from it.
So how do I find out which programs create these thumbnails?
--
"Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down."
http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm
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