 Around this time every year, I decide that it's time for me to actually dive deep into my computer and get rid of the things that just need to go away. And I'm not the best at cleaning the up stuff throughout the year, so I always find just a ton of cruft that has just kind of accumulated over a year of computer use. Even when I've hopped distros many times, there's still stuff that kind of transfers over between hops that just really doesn't need to be there. So what I thought I would do today is talk about five applications that can help you do your spring cleaning on your Linux machine. So let's go ahead and jump right in. Okay, so the first application is called Bleach Bit. And what Bleach Bit basically does is it deletes temporary files. Now, in some way, what I mean when I say temporary files, I mean files that are associated with things that are downloaded on your computer, things that accumulate through system use, stuff like that. Usually we're talking about caches and cookies and system logs and stuff like that. Now, one of the things I find this most useful for is clearing browser files. So if you use multiple browsers and you want to delete the cookies and the cache and stuff like that of all those browsers all at the same time, this is the way you can do it. You can also delete histories and stuff like that. So your bash history, your vim history and stuff like that. Those can be deleted. And basically what it does is it saves you space on your machine. And in the case of the browser files, it can actually speed up your browser because a lot of times with more cookies and caches and stuff like that, the bigger those files are, the slower your browser is. And you can actually speed those things up by deleting them. Now, one thing you'll need to know is that Bleach Bit comes with two different versions when you install it. One of them is just the regular plain old vanilla version. The other one allows you to run the version as root. And you want to avoid that version unless you know absolutely what you're doing because there are some files in that version that you can delete that will break your system if you delete them. So you should only mess around with that stuff if you know absolutely what you're doing. So that is Bleach Bit. Let's go ahead and move on to the next one. So the next one on the list is called Doop Guru. Now, what Doop Guru does is it basically finds duplicates on your system and it does so in a fairly easy way. So what you do is just select a directory, select the application mode that you want it to be in. So a lot of times you are looking for duplicate pictures or duplicate music, whatever, or if it's other things, just hit standard. And then you hit scan and it will scan your directory that you selected for duplicates and then it will show you a list of the things that are actually that you have more than one of. And it's fairly simple. And then it allows you to take that list and either move the duplicates to different files, move them to trash, just delete them. You can rename them, whatever you want to do. There's a ton of different actions that you can do on the duplicates. And this will mean that you no longer have five different photos of your family reunion that are all exactly the same or whatever. One of the things that I find this useful for is my wallpapers. A lot of times I download a wallpaper, not realizing that I've already downloaded it five times. And I don't really need five copies of that wallpaper. So I run this and it'll allow me to pair that down so I only have one copy or whatever. So that is deep guru. It's actually really good. Now, one thing I will say is that the larger the directory that you're scanning, the longer that it will take. So just know that if you want to pair that time down, just a little bit, drill down into the directory structure as much as possible so that the folders are smaller or at least possibly smaller. And you will save some time on scanning. If you are further up in the directory structure and you've selected the recursive scanning, it will take quite a long time because it's going to drill down into every directory below it. So that is deep guru. Now, the next one on the list is called Q Durstatt, Q-D-I-R-S-T-A-T. Now, what basically what this does is it allows you to scan a drive and find the largest files on those drives. And what this will be helpful for is locating those files that are just taking up a crap load of space on your hard drives. So if you have an external hard drive, chances are you're probably using it for backups. And one of the things that I've been guilty of for a long time is I make duplicate backups of my music collection over and over and over again. I have like probably 20 different backups of my music collection. It's really dumb. It's all in one hard drive and I don't need that many. My music collection doesn't change that often. So I don't really need that many backups of music collections. So using something like Q Durstatt, I can scan my external hard drive and find all of those files that are just super huge and then do things with them. I can delete them. I can move them, whatever I want to do. And while I will say that the program here is a little complicated and it's definitely not the prettiest thing in the world, it definitely does its job and it gives you a visual representation of the drive so you can kind of see where the directories are, where the big files are. You can locate the biggest file on the drive and so on and so forth. There's just a ton of stuff here you can do and it will allow you to hopefully save quite a bit of room on your your hard drive whether it's your internal hard drive or your external hard drive, whatever it is. One thing I will caution you for is that once you delete something, obviously it's gone. So make sure you're either knowing exactly what you're doing and deleting stuff that you know you can delete without being sad about it or, you know, have backup. Obviously, you should always have a backup. But that is Q Durstatt. This is one of the applications that I always install. And I don't use it as often as I shouldn't use it because I should definitely use it once a month. But usually it's once or twice a year, even though I have it always installed and it will just allows me to save a whole bunch of space because I'm always backing up stuff that I don't really need to back up or just have a whole bunch of files that I can just delete and save some space. So that is Q Durstatt. OK, so the next one on the list is a little bit hard to explain. And it's actually a two first. So you're getting two different recommendations here. And they're basically to do the same thing, just ones in the terminal, ones of GUI. So what we're talking about here is our sync. Now, our sync itself is a terminal based application and allows you to basically back up your system. And there's just a ton of different options for this and a ton of different ways you can go about doing it. And I'm not going to cover all those in this video, but you'll see at least a command or a script that I run. And what this does for me is it downloads all of the stuff from my home directory into a place on an external hard drive. And one of the greatest things about this whole thing is that I discover something, a flag called dash dash exclude. And that allows me to exclude certain directories on my in my home directory from being backed up at all. So it takes care of that whole thing I was talking about earlier, where I have backed up a whole bunch of directories of my music collection. This way, I can exclude that music collection and the same thing with like my ISOs directory and so on and so forth. And that means that I can not have a whole bunch of extra space that I don't need. What our sync basically does is it takes whatever directory you are that you want and then backs it up to another directory in another place. That's really all it does. Think of it as cloning. It could it can clone a whole hard drive. It does that. There's a ton of different flags and stuff that you can use in order to make it either verbose or exclude things or exclude things of certain sizes. There's just a ton of stuff I highly recommend getting into the main man page and checking all the flags out that you can use. There's also a lot of tutorials online. If you're interested in me making a tutorial, make sure you hit the subscribe button. I'd really appreciate that. Now, if the terminal based version of our sync doesn't suit you, like you don't want to deal with all the flags and all that nonsense. There is a GUI front end for our sync. It's called GR sync. And what GR sync does is it basically does everything our sync does, but in a GUI, so it gives you buttons and check boxes and stuff. In the top form here, you put the directory of the source. So if you're doing slash home, you want to back up all of your home directory. You can do that in the bottom path area. You put the destination. So if your external hardware or whatever, and then you select your options, you hit the play button and it will back up your directory. One of the things you can do then is save the profile. So what this will do is it will save those paths and all your options to a file so that when you come back the next time, you can just find that profile. It'll save. Remember everything that you set? You just hit the play button again and it will then do another backup. You'll have to make sure that you know the options that you've set so that you know whether or not it's going to delete the backup you did previously. So if you notice in the our sync script that I showed earlier in the bureau, one of the things that I do is that in every backup that I do, it creates a new directory with the date on it. So I don't know if GR sync will actually allow you to do something like that. So just make sure you be careful with the backup so that you don't overwrite things that you don't want to overwrite. So that is our sync and GR sync. OK, so the last one on the list is called Stacer. Now Stacer is an application that is kind of a jack of all trades. It does an absolute ton of stuff. So it does a little bit of what bleach but does it will allow you to delete package caches, crash reports, application logs, caches in the trash and stuff like that. It will also allow you to see system stats. So things like CPU usage, memory usage, network usage and so on. And on top of that, it will also allow you to do a system wide search, which for whatever reason, I couldn't get to work. But I think that I was just using it wrong. It will also allow you to see what applications are being started up upon system startup. You can also change those things and delete those entries and turn them off and on whatever you want to do. And it will also allow you to see system services. So services that are running in the background, things that you would probably start up with like system D or something like that. And it will also allow you to see processes and packages and stuff like that. So if you wanted to uninstall applications from here, you could actually do that. And one of the things that it does is it will actually single out snap packages. So if you wanted to uninstall snap packages from here, you could do so. Now, I don't have any snap packages installed. So that was just a very brief view of that screen. But it does allow you to uninstall that stuff from here if you want to install uninstall that in terms of settings and stuff. It doesn't have a ton of settings so you don't have to mess around with all that. So basically what Stacer is is a kind of a jack of all trades, maintenance tool, it allows you to just do a ton of stuff for your system, system startup applications, see stats and stuff like that. So that is Stacer. Stacer is one of those applications that I tell pretty much everybody to download because it just does a ton of different stuff. And honestly, it's one of those applications that can kind of replace a whole bunch of other applications if you need to do some of the stuff. So that is Stacer and that is it for this video. If you have any applications that are similar to this thing that will help you do maintenance on your system, leave those in the comment section below. I'd really love to hear from you. 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