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I tried Bleachbit today on my Ubuntu server. But, it seems like it's trying to wipe free space, which takes a lot of time, and I don't need it.

How can I make Bleachbit not to wipe free space from the command line?

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  • The data that was previously written to files remains on disk when you delete the file. There are several tools that can recover deleted files from the free space on your disk. Restricting Bleachbit from processing "free space" defeats the "privacy" purpose.
    – waltinator
    Aug 18, 2015 at 17:15
  • @waltinator Yeah, I know that, but I don't really have anything to hide, I just want to free disk space without the waste of resources
    – Duncan
    Aug 18, 2015 at 20:55

1 Answer 1

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Please note the distinction:

  1. "Wiping free disk space": can take hours because it basically fills up the hard drive
  2. "Overwriting existing files": adds a little extra time as it deletes specific files, such as cache and logs

In the case of #1, simply do not use the system.free_disk_space option on the command line. This seems so simple so maybe you mean #2.

In the case of #2, if it is enabled in the GUI, turn it off in the GUI or edit ~/.config/bleachbit/bleachbit.ini. If it is not enabled in the GUI, it will be off in the command line unless specified with the --overwrite option.

For your use case (freeing disk space) you want to disable both #1 and #2.

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  • #1 worked for me, thank you very much! I used bleachbit -c system.*, which used the system.free_disk_space cleaner
    – Duncan
    Aug 19, 2015 at 4:59

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