0

Let me start off by saying that I’m well aware of the difference between B and iB and this is not a discrepancy involving terminology as it does not relate to total disk space but space used on the disk compared to space available on the disk, both in the same measurement system.

Now that that is out of the way, I have a hard drive reporting with df -h a total size of 4.6T and only 12K of used space, yet it also says there is only 4.3T of available space. I’m no mathematician but last time I checked 12K =/= 300G… How do I find this “ghost data” and remove it from my drive? I’ve had my server offline for like two days because of this.

I’ve already tried lsof /path/to/drive | grep deleted but that didn’t help. I’ve also tried shred and Diskpart> clean /all (windows) reformatting as ext4 and using fsck after every thing but nothing seems to get rid of it.

Ego
  • 3
  • Formal note: there's no such thing as iB. In MiB the i belongs to the Mi prefix. – Kamil Maciorowski Dec 06 '22 at 23:25
  • reserved space on ext4 is 5%, that is about 230G in your case... – don_crissti Dec 06 '22 at 23:36
  • Reserved for what/who? Why is it reserved? What file system should I use that won’t steal all my space? – Ego Dec 06 '22 at 23:39
  • https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/110332 - you can decrease the reserved space if you so wish although it's usually advised against – don_crissti Dec 06 '22 at 23:43
  • Well I’d say that pretty much solves it. I don’t see an option to add a check next to your answer though. – Ego Dec 06 '22 at 23:57
  • Not sure of the details of ext4, but typically: root user is told the available size without the reserved blocks; space for inodes is reserved separately; space is used by the free space mapping. – Paul_Pedant Dec 07 '22 at 00:52

0 Answers0