On 12/28/22 14:45, Bill Cunningham wrote:
What files are basically safe to remove because they are caches and
such? There is the invisible file .cache. And the /var/cache. The files
in /tmp are these safe to delete? Are there any other files you can
delete? For example if you were using rsync, what file would you not
want to backup, because they are just caches?
Just because they are a cache doesn't mean they are necessarily safe to
delete while running. Most applications take care of managing their
cache files. Technically, you can delete stuff in /var/cache, but don't
at least don't delete the top-level directories. e.g. /var/cache/dnf
Of course, if you delete cached files, that usually means that they will
have to be downloaded again when you want to use them.
Don't delete files in /tmp unless you know it's safe to do so. There
are important files in there and you might find things not working
properly if you delete them. /tmp is by default tmpfs, so anything in
there won't persist over a reboot. Also, there is a process that cleans
old files, so unless you've put something big in there yourself and need
the RAM back, you don't need to do anything.
For backup purposes, you can certainly skip the various cache
directories. /var/cache for the system and ~/.cache for the users. I
think most applications use that now, but there might be some
application that stores cache files somewhere else.