Space on disk much larger than actual filesizes

[Bhaskar Kandiyal]

Hi,

Have you tried "Disk Usage Analyzer"? It will scan your filesystem to
tell you which files take up how much disk space, it's really great.
Install it with: sudo apt-get install baobab

Also, try cleaning your apt cache by doing: sudo apt-get clean (or sudo
apt-get autoclean).

PCManFM also reports false folder sizes sometimes. I have a folder with
13GB of contents and PCManFM reports it as 14GB. I've checked with both
du and dolphin.

I hope this helps you.

Regards,
Bhaskar Kandiyal

On 05/18/2012 10:29 PM, Keith Clark wrote:
> On 12-05-17 09:08 PM, Jonathan Marsden wrote:
>> 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
> pastebin.ca/2150309
>>
>> and lastly
>>
>>    df -hk /path/to/dir
> pastebin.ca/2150310
>>
>> 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)
> pastebin.ca/2150311
>>
>> which should provide a lot of technical info about the filesystem.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jonathan
> 
>