Well as it turned out I was able to free up 400 GB on mainpc with only a little effort and easily get that on serverpc as well but it will soon be gobbled up with more mosaics so I will have to get creative with deciding how many mosaic files I need to keep on serverpc. The backups are underway again but I am only keeping one generation of backup for serverpc and two each of the other two computers, it can be slow as a full backup can take more than a day which is why I have a dedicated computer, in this case mediapc, which is running the backup while I can keep using the other computers that are being backed up as normal. Once mediapc has finished doing the backup of mainpc it will be reinstalled with Debian 9.6 with KDE on top as I only need one computer running XFCE and that will be playerpc. In the process mediapc gets its swap put back onto using all the SSD space as there have been issues that it can’t hibernate at the moment and it needs to have that swap available if it is doing big tasks with only 8 GB of RAM. I am meanwhile pushing along finishing the installation of playerpc under the desk.
Computing resources optimisation [2F]: Managing Disk Space Usage
The completion of this computer upgrade project is close to finished. I do have to complete mounting the fourth computer, which is inching along at a glacial pace at the moment, and various small tasks. One of the important ones is that mainpc’s disks which have a total capacity of 1.8 TiB or 2 TB are nearly full. The main increase in capacity use is to do with mapping. This is to some extent the Maps folder and to a lesser extent Oracle virtual machines that have been used to run different software versions. Each time I download more aerial photography for maps it takes up additional space. I am satisfied the usage is appropriate so I now have to look at whether other resources can be released to make more space for various uses.
In the past I did look at moving some stuff like photos or other media to mediapc. I am not sure this is going to be easy or actually possible because right now mediapc’s disks are nearly full and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way of freeing up capacity. It will probably be a case of cleaning up a few folders here and there on mainpc especially where duplicated on mediapc. The Downloads and DownloadArchive folders on mainpc together total more than 300 GB and I think working through them regardless of how tedious or slow it is, is going to be worthwhile. At the very least there are large volumes of LDS downloads that can be cleaned up. It shouldn’t be too hard to free up at least 100 GB relatively quickly and take some of the pressure off the fact I only have 132 GB free at the moment.
serverpc is the other major disk space gobbler with for the most part the aerial mosaics using nearly half of the total disk. With more and more mosaics being put together as the maps progress, I have to take a hard look at whether I need to keep so many files. Cleaning up downloads will also yeild space savings on that computer. With it now having 32 GB of RAM there is less demand for swap space in the past and it does have the SSD available for swap, but still it is currently down to less than 100 GB free space available. It is actually so simple and quick to make mosaics that I don’t really need to keep the last three files of each one and possibly I can cut back to just the most recent file.
Cleaning all these up will also speed up backups. With mediapc becoming the backup host, I have to get it set up to run some backups which are very overdue of late.
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