Ubuntu – analyse disk space usage of an encrypted home directory

cleanupdisk-usagehome-directory

I'm having some problems with a full disk.
According to df -k I'm using 47 gb of data in my home folder and I have no idea where all of that data is hiding. I tried using the disk usage analyser aka baobab but since my home directory is encrypted I can't analyse which folders are using all of the data (since the $home directory is just a virtual representation of my encrypted data and is more of a phantom view so baobab just keeps scanning endlessly without counting any data when I ask it to just scan my home directory).
Does anyone know of a good method to analyse where all of my disk space went??

Btw does anyone have some good suggestions for clearing up disk space?

Best Answer

open a terminal

at the command prompt enter the command du /home/$USER| sort -n

and you'll soon find where all the space is being used near the bottom of the output. Videos seems a likely location or perhaps the directory you store your Virtual Machines.

This takes just a few seconds on my system.

614919684   /home/me/VirtualBox VMs
1324521232  /home/me

real    0m2.567s
user    0m0.137s
sys 0m0.275s
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