Recommended hard drive diet?

[Garry Knight]

David Armour wrote:

> what constitutes "stripped-down" these days?

If you keep videos on your hard drive you could play around with, say,
ffmpeg to find out which is the smallest format you could convert them to.

Ogg files are smaller than MP3s, though it's only useful to convert them if
you're not regularly downloading them onto an MP3 player. And writing the
scripts to convert videos and MP3s will keep *you* slim. :-)

And if you prefer MP3 format, do your MP3s have to be at 128-192 Kbps? I use
lame to resample some of mine down to 64 or even 32 Kbps in order to fit as
many as possible onto my Pocket PC (I have 17 albums worth on there at the
moment, totalling 101.7 MB. Who needs an iPod?). And MP3s containing just
speech can be resampled down to 16 Kbps or lower in some cases. Of course,
if you do resample them, you'll want to back up the originals on CD.

Open Document Format files are smaller than .doc, .rtf, and so on. And both
OpenOffice and KOffice can handle them. So if you've been using old formats
for the sake of compatibility, maybe now's the time to change. I believe OO
has the ability to convert a directory full of documents in one batch.

Any files you don't use much (or not at all) you could compress. I use zip
with mine. And I usually zip whole directories of mostly-unused stuff. I
can then use Midnight Commander (mc) to view them as it can treat a zip
file (or .gz, or .tgz, or .bz2) as a directory. 

Of course, if there are a lot of files you don't use much, or files you
don't intend to edit or change in the future, you can burn them to CD. The
first candidate that springs to mind is /usr/share/doc:
[garry ~]$ du -hs /usr/share/doc
774M    /usr/share/doc

You could fire up Synaptic and go through the list of installed packages,
pruning out the ones you never use. The ones that don't also require
removing ubuntu-desktop, of course...


These are just off the top of my head. Hey, if you get enough replies, you
could start the Small Hard Disk Diet HowTo.  :-)

-- 
Garry Knight
garryknight at gmx.net