system-monitor-graph@rcassani: Desklet space reporting on backups

[DonEdwards]

Desklet version/Build date

current as of bug report date

Cinnamon version

6.0.4

Distribution

Mint 21.3

Graphics hardware and driver used

not relevant

Desklet name and maintainer

system-monitor-graph@rcassani @rcassani

What happened?

Disk reporting can be seriously off, on a disk used for backups by e.g. timeshift or backintime. Both of which heavily use hard links. It appears that the desklet is adding up the size of each file in any directory, whereas in that specific usage there might be a dozen directory entries pointing at the same file - for each of a million or so files. Free space reporting is also off, apparently gotten by subtracting the (incorrect) total size of files from the stated capacity of the partition - rather than asking the partition.

RIght now, on my backup drive, the desklet is reporting 595 GB free out of 1863, whereas rdfind says there are 300 GB occupied; gnome-disk-utility and nemo agree there's 1.7 TB free.

Possibly also worth noting: my backup partition is formatted btrfs with transparent compression turned on.

Other information

No response

[rcassani]

The total and available disk metrics in the Desklet comes directly from the command /bin/df.

You may want to further investigate this:

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/383933/df-and-hard-links-issue-for-backup
• https://serverfault.com/questions/958688/hard-drive-with-many-hard-links-fills-almost-overnight