In this guide, we will be showing you how to check disk space on Ubuntu using the terminal or GUI.
There are a couple of ways that you can check the disk space on the Ubuntu operating system that we will be exploring.
If you are running a version of Ubuntu that has a graphical interface, this process is made very simple by two inbuilt applications. These applications allow you to get the free disk space of every filesystem in just a few clicks.
There is even a built-in tool to quickly see what files are consuming the disk space on your Ubuntu system.
Regarding the terminal side of things, we can utilize a handy built-in tool that goes by the name “df“. While not as versatile as the desktop tools, it allows you to quickly get the disk space usage of your filesystems.
Hopefully, by the end of the following two sections, you will be able to check the disk space usage of your Ubuntu filesystems quickly.
Checking Disk Space using the Ubuntu Desktop Interface
There are two pieces of software installed on Ubuntu that you can utilize to check how much disk space is left on your Ubuntu device.
Each software displays the information slightly differently, but all will tell you how much disk space is currently being used.
Using the Disk Usage Analyzer
The disk usage analyzer is one of the best ways to check the disk space on Ubuntu. One of the reasons for this is that the tool gives you a complete breakdown of what is consuming disk space.
Over the next few steps, we will show you how to open this application on your device and use it to check what is consuming your disk space.
1. One of the fastest ways to open the Disk Usage Analyzer on Ubuntu is to utilize the activities screen.
Open the activities screen on your device by clicking the top or bottom left of the screen.
2. Once the activities screen is opened, use the search box (1.) to look for “Disk Usage Analyser“.
As you type, you should eventually see “Disk Usage Analyser” appear on the screen (2.). Then, click the text or icon of the application to open it.
3. The Disk Usage Analyser on Ubuntu will immediately summarize your Ubuntu systems disk space.
However, this tool also lets you get detailed information on what is consuming the disk space on Ubuntu by clicking one of the displayed devices and locations.
4. After clicking one of the devices or locations, you will get a breakdown of what’s located on that particular drive or folder.
Using this functionality, you can see where disk space is consumed on your Ubuntu system.
Checking Disk Space with Ubuntu System Monitor
The other way of checking the disk space on Ubuntu while only using the GUI is to use the System Monitor.
The system monitor doesn’t break down the information as much as the “Disk Usage Analyser” but is great when you only need a quick overview of your available disk space.
1. To open the System Monitor on Ubuntu, you will want to utilize the activities screen.
You can open the activities screen by clicking the screen’s top or bottom left side.
2. Now that the activities screen is open, you can use the search box (1.) to search for the “System Monitor” application.
After typing, you should see the “System Monitor” application appear (2.). Click this application’s icon to open it on your device.
3. To check the disk space of your Ubuntu device, you will want to change to the “File Systems” tab.
Once on this tab, you can check each partition on your Ubuntu device and see how much disk is utilized. This tool breaks it into four different columns.
- Total: This is the amount of storage this particular partition can hold. Note that this may not match the total size of your drive.
- Free: This value shows how much disk space is available on this Ubuntu partition.
- Available: The available storage is the total amount you can use. The root file system may reserve a portion of the free storage.
- Used: The final value shows how much of your Ubuntu device’s disk space has been consumed.
Using the Terminal to Check Disk Space on Ubuntu
To check the disk space on Ubuntu using the terminal, we will utilize the df command. The “df” stands for “disk free” and is a standard Unix utility used for checking the available disk space on a file system.
In the following section, we will show you how to use this tool to check the free disk space on your Ubuntu system.
1. If you are using a flavor of Ubuntu that has a desktop interface, you can open the terminal quickly by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.
2. With the terminal open, all you need to do now to check the disk space on your Ubuntu device is to type in the following command and press ENTER.
This command will grab the available space on each drive and output it to the terminal. By using the “-H” option, we are telling the df command to print it in a human-readable format.
df -H3. After running the above command, you will be able to see the total size of each filesystem, the amount of space consumed, and the amount of free disk space still available.
The main filesystems you are likely interested in start with “/dev/” as these are typically devices such as your hard drives.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 795M 1.7M 793M 1% /run
/dev/vda2 39G 11G 27G 28% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
/dev/vda1 511M 5.3M 506M 2% /boot/efi
tmpfs 795M 2.5M 792M 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sr0 3.5G 3.5G 0 100% /media/pimyubu/Ubuntu 22.04 LTS amd64Conclusion
By this point in the guide, you should know how to check the disk space on an Ubuntu operating system.
When using the desktop interface, you have two very powerful tools that allow you to understand what files are consuming space on your system quickly.
If you only have access to the terminal, the simplest way to check the disk usage is to utilize the “df” command, as we have shown.
Please comment below if you have any questions about checking the disk space on the Ubuntu system using either the GUI or terminal.
If you found this tutorial helpful, we have plenty of other Ubuntu guides you should explore.
