Re: [Usability] Out of Disk Space?

["Dylan McCall" <dylanmccall gmail com>]

It shouldn't wait for the drive to be too full, but rather prompt when
the trash consumes a certain percentage of the drive. I think it would
make sense to keep the "full trash" prompt separate.

For example, one doesn't take out the trash when his entire house is
full of garbage; he takes out the trash when it is full. The only
difference in this case is that the garbage bin can, theoretically,
comfortably expand to a rather large size. People can bump into trouble
with full hard drives before GNOME kicks in with a "your hard drive is
filling up" message. The reason for this being that the message would
have to pop up at a rather critical point to avoid driving people
crazy. On the other hand, it would be less common but perhaps more
helpful, if a report was popped up when a certain location such as
Trash or a certain user's folder, is noticed to have a proportionally
unfair share of the hard drive.

Sorry, I can't really think how to explain my reasoning properly. (Eeek!). Hopefully I make sense!
I'm thinking of the difference between procrastinating, leaving all the
cleaning until a critical point, versus having the disk cleaned up routinely, keeping the drive usage consistently minimal, which would be a helpful and quiet method causing minimal obstruction.

Bye,
-Dylan McCall

On 9/17/07, Jacob Beauregard < jake13jake comcast net> wrote:

I was reading this article, and stumbled upon this section:

"Now, being familiar with Linux, this cause wasn't hard to find -- like
Windows, Ubuntu defaults to 'backing up' all deleted files into a
'Trash' folder, so that they can be undeleted. Checking my '.Trash'
directory, hidden under the home folder, I had 7GB of data over the past
seven months that could be deleted. As a whole, the 'Trash' folder idea
is a nice one, except for the following: When Ubuntu told me I had run
out of space, it didn't tell me I happen to have almost 7GB of data in
Trash that could be deleted to free up space, and didn't offer me the
option to empty it.

This is, for want of a better phrase, /bad form/. Even Windows will
prompt in advance as disk space runs out to run a disk clean up and, in
the process, empty the Trash."


I've only ever actually had this problem once, and didn't bother to
think about it in this sense.
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