Which folders and files do I need to exclude from TimeShift?
Also is there a way to also exclude programs installed as .deb ?
I doing this to reduce Backup size as I have limited storage.
100GB - Windows 11
400GB - Storage
400GB - Mint
100GB - TimeShift
df is the standard command line tool to see how much of your disk space is free.
The problems happen in GUI tools too. Most of the time, they work out in your favour (you think you only have 10GB left but you can put 15GB away) but after a lot of deletes you may “lose” some space until you do a rebalance even through you’d think looking at the stats that you have plenty of space.
Another issue is that file managers showing you a file’s size often don’t know about compression. You can store a large text file with standard compression on a disk and have it be reported as 100MB while it only takes up a megabyte of space. You can end up deleting a whole bunch of “hundred megabyte files” and save basically no disk space. Other file types, like images and video, often do represent the real size as they’re already compressed, making some 100MB files larger than others. If you don’t enable compression, you won’t have this problem, or course.
GUI tools also often don’t know about CoW. If you copy a file on BTRFS, the copy action should be instant and take up maybe a couple hundred bytes for the new metadata. To your file manager it looks like you have two 3GB movie files, but in practice they’re just names pointing to the same directory. You can get petabytes of used disk space this way by just making more and more copies, even though your actual disk space barely grows. This also means deleting files may not clear up as much disk space as you’d like.
🥲
How do you manage this though?
I take advantage of the free disk space savings and don’t worry about disk space much. I’ll clear out my download directory and maybe some caches when my disk usage grows beyond 80% (as reported in GUI tools). Running
duperemoveacross my drive every now and then also tends to help a lot without deleting anything.If I do run out of space, there are a few interactive terminal tools that’ll point out the biggest files so I can delete them and save some space in a pinch. I practice, I just don’t really think about it much.