Over 250GB available BUT not enough space error

[andreas85]

@alexsuff

I decided to delete all my snapshots (just 4 total) and now free space is increasing somehow!
I am not sure if will be what I expect but at least something is happening here…

It doesn’t matter how many snapshots you have. A large number does not necessarily need a lot of space.
Rather, it is the age of the snapshots that plays a role (because then there are many files in them that have changed in the meantime)

It is often very helpful to delete first only the oldest snapshot.

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Btrfs needs some time to clean up after deleting snapshots. Meanwhile, more and more space is slowly being displayed as free. You can watch this as root with “watch btrfs usage …” in a terminal.

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And it is possible to have 500GB Data on a btrfs-partition with 400GB, and even have 150GB unallocated (when compression is on)

[alexsuff]

the oldest one was dated nov 17th 22 and I did not make many changes on my system since that
I’d really love to understand this mess but for now I am glad it is solved

thanks to everybody for helping me today!
take care

[Zesko]

@alexsuff

I decided to delete all my snapshots (just 4 total) and now free space is increasing somehow!

Look the similar issue:

Neither 'df' nor 'btrfs fi df' showing diff after deleting large files

I am running out of disk space (the symptom being that virsh won’t create a new vm with an error indicating lack of space. So I am trying to make space but can not see any difference even after removing quite large items. 1. checking usage $ sudo df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 443G 436G 4,6G 99% / 2. identifying a large file $ sudo find /var/lib/libvirt -name WS19.qcow2 -exec ls -lh {} \; -rw------- 1 root kvm 41G 7. Okt 2020 /var/lib/libvirt/i…

You can exclude some data from home snapshot:

• Downloads and ISO
• VM images
• Games
• public data, it exists everywhere in internet.
• (Home cache)

[andreas85]

@alexsuff

the oldest one was dated nov 17th 22 and I did not make many changes on my system since that
I’d really love to understand this mess but for now I am glad it is solved

This may happen, when using timeshift in rsync-mode on btrfs

[TriMoon]

@andreas85

This may happen, when using timeshift in rsync-mode on btrfs

For those intrigued about the reason:
I think it’s because of the normal operating mode of rsync which does a “create temp file and rename over the old original” which uses new space on the disk, while the btrfs way uses hard-links IIRC…