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I'm a complete noob with ubuntu and I've been trying to learn since I recently transitioned from windows.

I made a stupid mistake by trying to install the upgrade when I had low disk space.

I now get an low resultion error and I believe it is because of the low disk space. I have a usb hard drive that I would like to transfer some of my work over which will free up a few gigs of space.

I only have the terminal to work with so if I can have some help to figure out how to locate my files using the terminal and then transfer them over to the usb hard drive I'd really appreciate it.

I've tired it on my own and had no luck, like I said, I'm a complete noob and the terminal can be intimidating for a GUI user like myself.

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Before you move personal files off, try clearing the apt cache and removing old kernels. To clear the apt cache:

sudo apt-get clean

You can remove some old kernels using:

sudo apt-get remove autoremove

and the instructions in the answers to How do I remove old kernel versions to clean up the boot menu?

You can clear out the Trash:

rm -rf .local/share/Trash/*

That ought to clean up some space. Try restarting to see if the GUI works.


To copy files, first we will identify your USB drive and mount it, if it wasn't automounted. Do:

lsblk

This will list connected drives in a tree form, listing sizes and mount points. Your USB drive is likely to be sdb (and the partition on it sdb1). If there is no mount point listed next to it (it's a path like /media/My Drive), we will mount it manually:

sudo mount -o rw,uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -u),umask=022 -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt 

(I am assuming your hard drive is using the NTFS filesystem - if not remove everything between mount and /dev/sdb1.) Now, the real trouble is locating your files. I am pretty sure they are in your home directory, and your home directory is not on a separate partition. (If it is, copying stuff from home directory won't help with the low space issue.) First make a directory to hold your backups (not necessary, but good for organizing):

mkdir /mnt/backup

Now you can move stuff from a folder in your home directory (say Documents):

mv ~/Documents /mnt/backup
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  • Perfect!!! Thank you very much muru. I didn't have to move any files, just cleaning up the old kernals freed enough space. You save me a lot of work, again thank you for helping me with this issue. Jul 30, 2014 at 9:13

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