How to Analyze Disk Usage on Raspberry Pi through Filelight

Worried about Raspberry Pi system disk usage? Install Filelight. It’s an open-source tool used to visualize disk usage in the form of a pie chart. It helps you keep a check on your Raspberry Pi system disk usage by showing you the information in the form of a Pie chart. You can also use this tool to view the information of a specific folder on your Raspberry Pi system.

Follow this article to install Filelight on Raspberry Pi system and start analyzing disk space usage.

Analyzing Raspberry Pi’s Disk Usage Through Filelight?

Follow the below-written steps to install Filelight on Raspberry Pi:

Step 1: First update and upgrade the repository because the Filelight is installed from the official Raspberry Pi repository:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

Step 2: Then install Filelight from the repository by running the below-mentioned apt install command:

$ sudo apt install filelight

Step 3: Verify the installation of Filelight by running the below-written command:

$ filelight -v

Accessing Filelight

Once the Filelight is successfully installed then it can be easily accessed through both terminal and GUI. For the GUI method, just click on Application Menu then Accessories and finally click on Filelight to open it:

Or for the terminal method simply open the terminal and type filelight:

$ filelight

Both methods will end up opening the same Filelight interface:

Analyzing Disk Usage on Raspberry Pi using Filelight

When you open the Filelight interface, you will see two pie charts, for the boot and for the root. These charts are displaying the available and used spaces in each of these:

Let’s start by analyzing the Home directory first, and for that click on the Scan tab then click Scan Home Folder:

As an outcome, it will display the full disk status of the home directory in a beautiful pie chart form, as shown below:

If you are interested in analyzing some other folder than you can do that by clicking on Scan and then Scan Folder:

And the whole list of all the folders/directories of your Raspberry Pi system will appear, you can choose any desired folder and then click the Choose button:

How to Remove Filelight from Raspberry Pi

At some point if you want to remove the Filelight from Raspberry Pi then simply run the below-written command:

$ sudo apt remove filelight

Conclusion

You can simply install Filelight from the official Raspberry Pi repository using the apt command. Then you can open it from the GUI through the “Accessories” option or terminal via “filelight” command. After that, you can scan whatever folder you want and view the disk usage of the Raspberry Pi system in the form of a pie chart.