Cleaning up space (on hard drives)

As a friend of backups, space is sometimes a dilemma for me.

After many years, I accumulated stuff in many disks, folders, vms, filesystems, ...

It was time to do some cleaning.

After some thinking I elaborated this strategy (simplified):

1- Using rsync, transfer all the data, from all the sources, to a single place. rsync would take care of transferring only what needed when needed, keeping always the latest version.

However, sometimes I move things around, so I need deduplication too.

2- Using fslint I can deduplicate files. However I found that for really large sets of files, the UI (fslint-gui) gets stuck on certain operations. On the command line version I found an option that is really useful when you want to deduplicate, but only above a certain size. And it's much faster.

For 1 I used
# rsync -zvahu --progress --exclude '*~' --exclude '.*/'     /source/    /destination/

For 2 I used the
# fslint-gui
and
# ./findup  -t  -d  /destination/  -size +200k   (remove the -t to really do something)

fslint is also quite useful to remove empty folders.

Note: To see all the help that the command findup has to offer, just do this

# cat findup | less

I was surprised to see that there is little more than the brief help offered with -h. For what I could see, it uses the linux 'find', so the 'precise filtering' parameters are the same ones that for 'find', but I may be wrong.

Findup is located on /usr/share/fslint/fslint

I am sure I will be using this info in the future :o)

Problems and solutions Installing DSL (Damn Small Linux) on a VM (virtual machine)

The VM is created using VMware workstation

This is just a summary of my problems and solutions:

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problem:
After booting from CD the mouse is not recognized. Cannot use the mouse.

solution:
When creating the vm, use the expert mode.
Try with older versions of the VM Hardware until you get it working. I got it working with virtualHW.version = "7" (but other versions may work too).

This happened again after booting in frugal mode from HD. Selecting ps2 mouse (instead of usb) resolved the issue.

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problem:
The hard drive is not detected, so I cannot create partitions and format them.

solution:
When creating the vm, use the expert mode.
When adding the hd, select IDE (ide1:0.present = "TRUE" if you look at the vmx file) instead of SCSI.

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problem:
I created a 50MB partition for the frugal installation (as recommended on the manual), however the installation fails and grub complains that there is no space left.

solution:
If you need 50MB, the partition should be larger as there is always some space lost.

If the virtual hd doesn't have the space preallocated, you will only use the minimum needed, so make it large (70+ MB).
The frugal installation really needs only 49.8MB.

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I hope it helps someone.