Trimming down /home - has anyone moved your Steam folder outside /home?

[oshunluvr]

Going through my system backups and my @home subvolume seemed really large at 273G. Here's every folder in my /home that's over 100MB:

167M ./.fgfs
223M ./.zoom
513M ./.var
1.6G ./.wine
1.9G ./.Harmonoid
2.9G ./Gdrive
3.2G ./Downloads
3.7G ./Videos
8.0G ./Documents
11G ./.config
14G ./.cache
18G ./Projects
32G ./Pictures
178G ./.local
273G .

Gdrive is not really on my PC - its my Google Drive sync location. The "normal" folders - Docs, Pics, etc. - are about what I expected, but 178G in .local and another 11+14 in .config and .cache were eye openers!

I was also surprised at how much Harmonoid caches. That, and Wine haven't been used for quite awhile so I'm just purging them. Now that I have Google Drive mountable with ocamlfuse, I will move some Docs and other stuff to there as I have about 60GB of space.

When I dug into .local I found that .local/share held almost all of the 178GB and that Steam held 170GB of that! So I think I may move Steam to a different location. Anyone every try this? From what I've read, it's easy as just moving the folder, launching Steam, it can't find your data so asks you where you moved it to, done.

1'll report on my success after I put my home folder on a "diet".

[claydoh]

I don't have mine on another drive currently, but only because I don't have enough drive connections on my very non-game thin client system.
But I have pretty much always had a library on a different drive.

But I also keep the one on my main drive as well, depending on how fast that second drive is.

The easiest way to add a new library on a different drive is to use the UI to do it.

After setting this up, you can then right click on a game and move it to the new library.
I know this is the 'hard' way, but I think I was having issues with simply moving the directory. It was a long time ago, though.
Once done, though, all I need to do after a fresh install is add a new library, and point it at the right place, and my 64 games are added.

I am not sure if btrfs is supported for external libraries, though. Last I looked it wasn't, only ext4. But again, this was some time ago, so it may work now.

[jlittle]

Relative to your steam stuff, this is minor...

I suggest making .cache a link to another subvolume, say $TOP/@cache/$USER, where $TOP is where you've got the btrfs root mounted. I've got firefox browser.cache.disk.parent_directory pointed in there as well; this is important because the contents churn rapidly, ballooning the amount of data sent to backups.

[oshunluvr]

Relative to your steam stuff, this is minor...

I suggest making .cache a link to another subvolume, say $TOP/@cache/$USER, where $TOP is where you've got the btrfs root mounted. I've got firefox browser.cache.disk.parent_directory pointed in there as well; this is important because the contents churn rapidly, ballooning the amount of data sent to backups.

That's an excellent idea. For sure .cache could cause a huge increase in incremental backups.

At this point, I have gone through a bunch of files and deleted quite a bit of old stuff and moved some to my server. Deleted wine and Harminoid.

Unfortunately, moving the Steam folder has not worked. I tried mounting a different location to the steam folder and using a bind mount, both of which resulted in a fatal error when attempting to launch steam.

[oshunluvr]

So I figured out what I was doing wrong re. moving Steam: you have to mount with the "exec" option or Steam cannot access the file system. So I created a new BTRFS file system, corrected the mount options and used the Steam "Add storage" and "Move" features. This seems to have done what I wanted with the added benefit of allowing separate snapshots/backups of the steam games not in my home subvolume. The steam folder in my home is now 5.5G which I can live with.

Next, I created a @cache subvolume and moved the contents of .cache into it.

My total home folder is now 53G down from 273G!!!

Obviously my backups will be much quicker and smaller than before.

[oldgeek]

Just an ignorant question oshunluvr: what command did you use to get the data on your original post?

[oshunluvr]

Just an ignorant question oshunluvr: what command did you use to get the data on your original post?

Not a dumb question at all. The command was

  du -h -d 1  |sort -h

I executed it in my home folder but you can control the path easily enough. So from anywhere, to see your home folder subfolder sizes:

  du -h -d 1 ~ |sort -h

To break it down:
"du" is the command to estimate file space (disk) usage
"-h" means human readable - basically use K, M and G instead of bytes
"-d 1" means read one level deep in the folder.
"~" means your home, but you could use any path.

So the above combination of options list the sizes of all the first level subfolders in my home folder in an easy to read form. The final bit:

|sort -h

lists the output in order of size (smallest to largest) with the "-h" telling sort that the input is in human readable format. Without the "-h" sort will put 71G before 8K because it's using alphabetical ordering. It makes more sense to use the numbers to order the list. If you use "-r" the order is reversed so "sort -hr" would get the largest subfolders at the top of the output.

[oldgeek]

Thanks for the lesson. By 'ignorant' I meant 'I don't know?. I have a further question. When I tried this, I got the following reading: 264G . What does the number refer to? what is'.'? Another 'ignorant' question!

[Snowhog]

In a Linux directory listing, "." represents the current directory, while ".." represents the parent directory, meaning the directory one level up from where you are currently located.

[oshunluvr]

Thanks for the lesson. By 'ignorant' I meant 'I don't know?. I have a further question. When I tried this, I got the following reading: 264G . What does the number refer to? what is'.'? Another 'ignorant' question!

264G would be a amount of space used by files in whatever directory you ran the command on.

[claydoh]

you have to mount with the "exec" option or Steam cannot access the file system

I knew I was forgetting something important lol.

[oldgeek]

Thanks for answering my questions!