How to clean caches in my homedir

My home directory is getting huge (100GB plus). When backupping it I notices that there are quite some caches there.

Which important caches are there in my homedir and how should I clean them?

One cache in particular is bothering me, the cache in .gvfs, where a copy of my network harddisk seems to be stored. How do I neatly clear this cache?

Solution 1:

The .gvfs is where network attached folders live. If you've used "Places/Connect to Server", or typed smb://server/share into Nautilus, that's where your network drive will "mount".

You need to exclude your .gvfs folder from your back up, unless you actually want your network drive and all its contents to be included in your back up.

Other places you should consider excluding :

• ~/.mozilla/**yourprofilename**/Cache
• ~/.cache (this is also where Chromium puts its cache, if you use that instead of firefox)
• ~/.thumbnails

Others to consider :

• if you use VirtualBox, your guest systems are likely stored in .VirtualBox. On the one hand, you'll want to back those up. On the other, they'll be huge, so maybe you should back them up separately from your generic home drive backup?
• if you use Dropbox, you'll probably not have much need to back that up! Exclude wherever you told Dropbox to put its folder.

Finally, you can do some of this analysis yourself! Go to your Applications menu and choose Accessories, then run "Disk Usage Analyzer" (AKA baobab).

Solution 2:

Are you certain that .gvfs actually includes COPY of your network hard disk or it is it just mounting point. Try to unmount those hard disks and check what it says it's size after that.

Think flash and browsers saves their caches to your home folder. Those are best to clear through browser's tools.

Solution 3:

For this purpose I have a cron task that runs periodically (for eg. @monthly) executing BleachBit (manual) in the command-line mode silently. Edit it with crontab -e:

0 1 1 */2 *  bleachbit --clean apt.autoclean chromium.cache deepscan.ds_store deepscan.thumbs_db firefox.cache google_chrome.cache nautilus.history system.cache thunderbird.cache

I configured it with GNOME Schedule GUI (source, removed as deb package, only available as snap; Last Update: 2016-05-25).

You can run

bleachbit --list-cleaners | column

to choose which cleaners you want to execute.