Space on disk much larger than actual filesizes

[Jonathan Marsden]

Keith,

On Thu, 17 May 2012 Keith Clark <keithclark at k-wbookworm.com> wrote:

> ... I've noticed that every directory is showing about 8x's more
> space taken up on the disk than the actual combined filesizes.  One
> directory has 114 MB on it, but it is taking up 918 MB of space on
> the disk.

Which software tools have you used to obtain the two numbers you
mention?  A specific example would help.  Is there anything unusual
about this filesystem or how it was created?

In what follows, I am using /path/to/dir to mean "the path to
the 'One directory' that you are referring to", since you didn't
actually tell us what it is :)

In a Terminal (LXTerminal) window, at a shell prompt, you can do

  sudo find /path/to/dir -print0 |sudo xargs -0 stat --printf "%b\t%n
\n" |sort -n

to get a sorted list of all the files concerned (including all hidden
files) preceeded by their sizes in kiloBytes. If that doesn't reveal
the cause of the issue to you, please email (or pastebin, and provide
links in email) the the results of running:

  sudo du -sk /path/to/dir |sort -n

which should list all files or directories at that level and their sizes
in kiloBytes, and

  stat -f /path/to/dir

and lastly

  df -hk /path/to/dir

This should get us useful info about what files are in the directory,
their sizes, and info about the filesystem they are being stored on,
including its block size.

In case the cause is really obscure, maybe also post the output of

  sudo tune2fs -l $(df -h /path/to/dir |grep ^/ |cut -d " " -f1)

which should provide a lot of technical info about the filesystem.

Thanks,

Jonathan
-- 
Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm>