While checking for used and free space in a btrfs subvolume, I’m not getting a consistent value. It’s confusing and doesn’t help.

  1. What is the correct way to find used/free space?
  2. Why are these values inconsistent (except normal du)?

According to btrfs fi usage /home, 83.21 GiB is used.

Overall:
    Device size:		 149.98GiB
    Device allocated:		 100.07GiB
    Device unallocated:		  49.91GiB
    Device missing:		     0.00B
    Device slack:		     0.00B
    Used:			  83.21GiB
    Free (estimated):		  63.06GiB	(min: 38.10GiB)
    Free (statfs, df):		  63.06GiB
    Data ratio:			      1.00
    Metadata ratio:		      2.00
...

As per btrfs fi df /home, used space is 82.86 GiB, not 83.21 GiB.

Data, single: total=96.01GiB, used=82.86GiB
System, DUP: total=32.00MiB, used=16.00KiB
Metadata, DUP: total=2.00GiB, used=178.61MiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=99.50MiB, used=0.00B

As per btrfs fi du -s /home , used space is 63.11 GiB.

     Total   Exclusive  Set shared  Filename
  63.11GiB    13.64GiB    49.01GiB  /home

While according to du -hs /home, 64GiB is used.

Also, maximum space used should be close to 72 GiB as per btrfs fi du -s / and 73 GiB as per du -hs /, if btrfs fi usage includes all subvolumes . ‘/home’ and ‘/’ are on separate subvolumes.

  • unhinge@programming.devOP
    0·
    7 months ago

    just comparing the subvolume with its snapshot with btrfs send -p /example/subvol /snapshot/of/example/subvol >examplediff.btrfs.

    From man btrfs-send

    generate a stream of instructions that describe changes between two subvolume snapshots

    Thanks for btdu, it seems useful as ‘btrfs fi du’ probably doesn’t account for compression, will check it out sometime.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      0·
      7 months ago

      Note that the diff does not necessarily correlate with the amount of data that changed, not how much additional space the snapshot takes.