I was doing a Clonezilla backup today, and discovered that my /home has filled up. Duf reports 8.1G in use. It shouldn’t be more than a couple gigabytes. When I mark all content in /home, in PCManFM, and right-click, the total size of files and folders is 2.5G.
I thought perhaps some Snapper home snapshots have gone MIA.
I did sudo btrfs subvolume list -s / | wc -l
…and snapper reports 2 snapshots.
But when I do sudo snapper list
… it reports no snapshots (I deleted all of them).
I’m almost certain I read in a thread here that old snapshots can go undetected by the file system, and that there is a method to clean it up. But for the life of me I can’t find it again.
I’d like to learn how to figure this, any tips are welcome.
I can’t be sure this a snapper issue.
It could be I have misunderstood how the Duf app works.
I may also have misunderstood how the snapper list command works - it only lists snapshot for the default profile which is root, not all profiles, it seems.
When I do cd ~; du -hs
to see the disk usage of /home, it only reports 3.1G. Which is close to what I expect.
Duf seems to report disk usage for the whole of /, also in the /home line. I don’t get what the purpose of that would be, but OK.
I guess 8G in total use by my installation and apps is about what is to be expected at this point.
It looks like I’ve misunderstood a couple of outputs and commands. It seems like disk usage of about 8G should be expected and reasonable, with the packages I’ve installed.
I’d still like to investigate the potential problem of snapshots lost to the filesystem though, for future reference.
In some situations, it seems like snapshots disappear into subdirectories in the /.snapshots subvolume.
I’ll probably be able to learn about this on my own. But if anyone has the link to the thread where it was mentioned here (I seem to remember a procedure to find and delete them), I’d appreciate it!
Time to learn some net security stuff. It’s been at the bottom of the list, with plenty of other things on the plate.
EDIT: Ah, I actually copied a command from the Opensuse snapper Wiki, which I went through to see if there was anything about snapshot ending up in sub-directories.
Enough beer this evening, it is a workday for me tomorrow.
snapper -c home create --description "before the big cleanup"
By default, snapper creates a nested subvolume called .snapshots which is nested inside the subvolume you are taking snapshots of. It then create sub-directories under that and creates nested subvolumes for each snapshot.
There’s been talk about snapshots disappearing from the file system in some situations, and I wanted to learn about it so I could be prepared if it should happen.