Ubuntu - Clean up the old updates and recover the storage space

Published on: 22nd Apr 2014

Updated on: 8th Jul 2025

Why cleanup

The more updates that you have done to the server, the more storage space the old stuff will occupy. To prevent running out of disk space, it's best to do cleanup once a month.

Here's how you do it

• Cleanup the unused components and it will recover some spaces,

  sudo apt --purge autoremove
  

• Other arguments that do partial of the cleanup,

  sudo apt-get clean
  sudo apt-get autoclean
  sudo apt-get autoremove
  
  # '-p' is priority and '-phigh' means set to high priority.
  sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh
  

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Author

Lau Hon Wan, software developer.