Space used by home directory and all sub directories

Support & Help Requests
1

I would like to find out the total amount of space used by my home directory and all files in the subdirectories.

Using Thunar, I went to my home directory and selected all, but it does not give the correct amount of space used.

I tried du -h, but it does not give a grand total.

2

du -h -s gave me 3.6 Gb. Is there a limit to how much can be in my home directory?

I have read of others running out of space in that directory.

3

You can use MATE Disk Usage Analyzer (Applications -> System Tools).

Mickey :relaxed:

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4

df -h will show you the different partitions of your filesystem. If you have a /home mounted to a separate partition, you are bound by the size of that partition. But if you just have one partition (/) for everything (/home is included in there), then you’re bound by the size of the whole disk.

case 1 one disk partition sda1 for everything
    /dev/sda1       140G  9.7G  123G   8% /
case 2, one partition sda1 for /, another sda3 for /home
    /dev/sda1       100G 30G    70G    33% /
    /dev/sda3       20G   5G    15G    25% /home

Are there benefits to have a separate partition for /home? yes, you can easily keep/backup your files and have different distros installed in the first partition. Disadvantage is you have no idea how big /home will become so when you install, you have to think ahead should I make my /home 50G, 100G, I don’t know. /home can be on a different disk if you prefer, one disk for the OS and one disk for your /home (sdc1)

There are ways to expand your /home and make it larger after install, assuming there is room in the disk (sda). That process is a bit involved but it can be done. Hope this helps.

5

Thanks.

/dev/sda1 1.6T 13G 1.6T 1% /

So I guess I have plenty of room.

Would there be any advantage in making more partitions even if they are not used?
I currently have a 2nd empty partition.

6

I also like qdirstat, which is similar but much faster.

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