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

Published on: 22nd Apr 2014

Updated on: 2nd Aug 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.

Another area that will occupy lots of space is the logs.

How to find out the storage usage

There are 3 commands that can help in finding out the storage capacity and usage:

• df- is a built-in utility for viewing the file system capacity and usage.

  For example, df -H will show the usage statistics in the file system and the size will be shown in 'Human readable' format.

  Sample output:

  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  tmpfs           101M  1.1M  100M   2% /run
  /dev/vda1        25G  4.0G   21G  16% /
  tmpfs           505M  1.1M  504M   1% /dev/shm
  tmpfs           5.3M     0  5.3M   0% /run/lock
  /dev/vda16      924M  118M  742M  14% /boot
  /dev/vda15      110M  6.4M  103M   6% /boot/efi
  tmpfs           101M   13k  101M   1% /run/user/1000
  

• du - is a another built-in utility for listing the directory or file storage usage. It is useful to find out which directory or file that occupied most spaces.

• ncdu - a nice and beautiful utility program that shows the capacity and usage for the sub-directories but it requires to install.

  To install this utility before using it.

  sudo apt install ncdu
  

  To view the space that has been occupied by the sub-directory at the current directory, run the following command:

  ncdu
  

  Then, an intuitive and beautiful result will appear. To find out why a directory is occupying so much space, you may use arrow key to choose the directory and then hit Enter key to drill into that directory.

To cleanup the files created by installation or upgrade

• 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
  

Related posts

• Add a new hard disk/partition to your server

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Author

Lau Hon Wan, software developer.