I booted up my computer tonight and one of my disks had a bunch of files
that were orphaned or some such thing. I ran fsck and they were all
recovered to lost+found. I took a look at them and they were a bunch of
thumbnails. Nothing that’s a problem losing.
I started looking around and I’ve got about 350 MB of files in the
~./.thumbnails directory. Some go back several years. Can I just
delete these? Is there a clean up routine similar to Windows “Disk
Cleanup” that is normally used or do folks just manually delete these
now and then? Any harm in do that?
On 2011-12-22 06:31, Kevin Miller wrote:
> I started looking around and I’ve got about 350 MB of files in the
> ~./.thumbnails directory. Some go back several years. Can I just delete
> these?
Yes.
> Is there a clean up routine similar to Windows “Disk Cleanup” that
> is normally used
Not that I know.
> or do folks just manually delete these now and then? Any
> harm in do that?
Not to my knowledge. Just that displaying those directories graphically the
next time will be slower.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
On 12/22/2011 01:03 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2011-12-22 06:31, Kevin Miller wrote:
>> I started looking around and I’ve got about 350 MB of files in the
>> ~./.thumbnails directory. Some go back several years. Can I just delete
>> these?
>
> Yes.
>
>> Is there a clean up routine similar to Windows “Disk Cleanup” that
>> is normally used
>
> Not that I know.
>
>> or do folks just manually delete these now and then? Any
>> harm in do that?
>
> Not to my knowledge. Just that displaying those directories graphically the
> next time will be slower.
Great, thanks. They were from multiple different directories - many of
which I rarely visit so a little slowness if/when they’re recreated
isn’t a big thing.
On a related noted, I presume I can just delete the files in the
lost+found directory too, yes?
Thanks to all who replied…
…Kevin
Kevin Miller
Juneau, Alaska http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.”
After you have satisfied yourself that there is nothing there which is needed. If the partition was a system partition then they may be system files and if you can’t identify where the files came from, it’s a bit like running an engine with a few screws missing. Although if the crash was due to sudden shutdown rather than disk errors, they are likely to be log files and temp files. But if there were disk errors, then you should plan to test the disk with smartctl and an orderly migration off it.
On 2011-12-22 19:09, Kevin Miller wrote:
> Great, thanks. They were from multiple different directories - many of
> which I rarely visit so a little slowness if/when they’re recreated isn’t a
> big thing.
A script could be written to find and delete old thumb files.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
they can be safely deleted , UNLESS thereis something in the thumbnails that might be incriminating …
( like the naughty pics of the girlfriend that your WIFE should not see )
if so you might want to shred them , so that they can NOT be recovered