This section documents how to manage your home folder on the workstations at Codam.

When starting as a student at Codam, you get a 10GB home folder for your studies. The path to this folder is ~, or /home/login. It has the structure of a home folder you usually find on any computer that runs Linux, meaning you will find your Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Videos, Music and Pictures folder in there. Use it to your liking (for your studies), it’s all yours! However, since it’s all yours, you will also have to manage it yourself.

Managing your home folder

As you might be aware, a 10GB drive fills up pretty quickly. It is smaller than almost all USB sticks on the market nowadays. However, for your studies, this size should be enough if you manage it properly! This means you should not keep any files you will not regularly use on there.

Here are some tips to help you out if you’re running low on space.

• Push your work to git, whether on vogsphere or GitHub, and remove local repositories from your home folder for projects you have already completed. To look at the code later, you can also make use of GitHub’s built-in web editor (press [ . ] on the keyboard while looking at a repository).
• Make use of goinfre and sgoinfre where possible. This is highly recommended for virtual machines and Docker containers.
• Do not only look for big files to delete, as small files can also take up a big portion of your home drive due to the allocation block size.
• Remove some VS Code extensions! They tend to use a lot of small files, filling up your home drive due to the point described above. While we’re at it, also check for duplicate VS Code installation folders (Insiders Edition).
• Clear application cache! Lots of applications write their cache to your home drive, such as Slack and VS Code. Use Google to find out how to clear this cache for applications you frequently use.
• Clear your Downloads folder! Do you really need that meme from 2015 in there?
• Reset (parts of) your home folder if none of this helps. Make a back-up first!

Utilities to clear storage space

The “du” command

Try running du -a ~ | sort -n -r | head -n 20 to see the top 20 largest paths in the filesystem of your home folder.

qdirstat

You can also use the qdirstat program to get a graphical overview of the file structure of your home folder. Simply open the software, select your home folder as the directory to open, and let it scan its contents.

Once the scanning is complete, you will be greeted by an overview similar to the one shown in the image below: