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)