Newbie - I really appreciate any help.
I am using Kubuntu 20.04 on a virtual maschine VMware on win10
20 Gb virtual memory.

Timeshift is taking automatic snapshots and I frequently deleted some of them when space became low. But forgot it and after some test with groups and shared directories Kde went black. I can use the mouse but no menu. Ctrl - Alt F2 gets me into cli.

Disk usage now says 20.9 Gb and trying to restore with Timeshift says segmentation fault because of lack of free space.

How do I delete the snapshots from timeshift (5 in total and only need the first) to recover?

Where does Timeshift save the files that take up space? In /timeshift/snapshots the filesizes are only 4.0K or so.

Better not to mess with manual deletion. Timeshift can be used from the command line for simple actions like this. It also has a manpage (use q to quit the manpage).So --list followed by --delete of the last couple should work. When you get back into your system, reset the kept count from the timeshift GUI.

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Your looking at the size of the directory not files contained within. 4096 is the size of space on the disk that is used to store the meta-information for the directory.

You might want to consider creating a separate virtual disk to store backups or enlarging the existing disk and creating a separate partition.

I assume you are using the rsync method to backup files. In Rsync mode, snapshots are created in an incremental fashion. Meaning only the changed/modified files and directories will be snapshot-ed in subsequent snapshots and unchanged files and directories will be hard linked to previous snapshots.

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https://itsfoss.com/backup-restore-linux-timeshift/ where it says how many to keep.

Thank you all for great suggestions. Stupid me did not realize it was a directory, but good so, else might have deleted into desaster.

This morning things have worsened. Now I can still get into cli. But some rest free space must have been filled and now when I run timeshift --delete or timeshift --restore the result is: "Segmentation fault (core dumped).

Any suggestions to what to delete to free up just a little bit of memory so timeshift will run?

Lack of knowledge is not stupidity - don't beat yourself up.

The normal solution is to use a liveUSB (say your original Kubuntu iso) to clean up the mess. Boot that in the VMWare guest and use timeshift from there - connect to your network and install it if necessary. May (will ?) require adjustments for file paths, but should be reasonably straight-forward. Deletes only, not restores IMHO.

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Follow up. I removed some cache which was about 200Mb. This made it possible to run sudo timeshift --list as proposed and then:
sudo timeshift --delete --snapshot '2022-10-12_16-29-08' (one of the snapshots - repeating with 2 more from the list)
After removing 3 snapshots I got free 1,8 Gb of space.
Then reboot and Plasma was back again!
Now I will limit timeshift and extend partition. Thanks all.

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