cleaning up home directory?

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 8:27 PM, Stephen <stephen-d-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> So I started to using rsync to back up my home directory.
>
> I used the arguments -av
>
> I see thousands of files in the ./thumbnails directory and sub-directories.
>
> It looks like pure garbage and I would think a hit on performance.
>
> Should I want to clean this up?
>
> What is Gnome doing here?

Yeah, chances are pretty good that these are ancient files and hence trimmable.

Wild guess would be that apps like Nautilus (file browser/manager)
would induce creation of such, when using a "file mangler" to browse
pictures and such.  It's not impossible that it might induce creating
little images to represent the first page of a spreadsheet or other
document.

Here's some suggestive confirmation :-)
http://embraceubuntu.com/2006/02/15/clean-up-old-thumbnails/

It suggests cleaning old ones out once a month; I'd suggest doing this
more frequently, but still, cleaning out only fairly old files.  It's
disappointing that there's not already something to do so.

A reasonable mechanism would be to have some Gnome parameter (I make
this up!) which indicates the age at which to let them go, and, any
time an application *generates* a new thumbnail, it should take a
quick peek, and attempt to clear out a few elderly ones.
Principles:
- This shouldn't be super-expensive, not compared to the computational
and I/O effort involved in creating a *new* thumbnail.
- Just trim a few each time; if the policy tends to clean out more
than it's generating, then the trend is in the right direction, and
things should never worsen beyond some initial level.
- A little cleaning at a time amortizes the cost so it shouldn't be
too noticeable.
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