Need to limit the amount of reserved space on disk I guess for trash

BD5321

4/27/24, 2:53 PM

I have Ubuntu MATE installed, 22.04 and I notice that there is a very large amount of disk space already used even with nothing on the disk other than the folders "lost+found" and ".Trash-1000"

The amount of space seem way too large that gets reported as used space. For instance on a 6 TB drive, there is 300GB that's designated as used space. On a 14 TB drive there is about 700GB that's designated as used.

To be this almost seems absurd that such a large amount of disk space can be allocated for some reason other than open space for a user. I could understand a reasonable amount of space set aside on a system disk, but such a large amount of space for a data disk is unrealistic to me.

Is there any way to configure Ubuntu to set aside a different amount of space it reserves, or is there a per drive method for changing this? I'm looked at disk settings under a GUI disk tool "Disks" but I don't see anything.

1 + 3

partitioning

mount

trash

hard-drive

David

4/27/24, 3:26 PM

It seems you may not be aware that formatting a hard drive will reduce the free space, the larger the drive the more will be used for this. A 6 TB drive will not have 6 TB free space once formatted and partitioned even if nothing is installed.

BD5321

4/28/24, 4:29 AM

Dude. Did you read the comment? Example, I am using a file explorer, Caja for instance, I right click on the drive (partition), and I get the information about the partition. It shows TOTAL CAPACITY for the partition, which I created, and it also shows USED space on the partition. It also shows FREE SPACE. If you have ZERO files on a partition, then if the operating system is not reserving any space on that partition, then FREE SPACE = TOTAL CAPACITY. This has absolutely nothing to do with buying a disk and wondering why TiB does NOT = TB. My comment is already answered.

BD5321

4/28/24, 4:59 AM

Also, the amount of space used to create a partition and format a disk is tiny. So even for what you said that's VERY far off from my comment. You're suggesting that on my 14TB drive I lose 700GB to creating a partition and formatting it. No. Just, no. Drive manufacturers list capacity in REAL numbers based on decimal math, whereas sometimes an OS, especially Windows, will list a rough value in a short number, such as 1.81 TB for a 2TB drive. That rough value is base on 1K = 1024 bytes. But Windows also lists the decimal capacity, such as 2,000,000,158,369 bytes, or 2TB.

Score:1

Ubuntu

ubfan1

4/27/24, 3:53 PM

5% of a filesystem is reserved for system, looks like that is what you are seeing. This may help critical programs run when the user fills up the disk. You may alter this number with the tune2fs program, alter the reserved space.

You only have to set the number once, not for every mount of the filesystem.

+ 2

BD5321

4/28/24, 4:43 AM

Thanks I looked up the command to see how to use it, and in this case the argument = m and then set a value for the percentage. Another question if I may, since I would always want this value set is there a startup file I could add this command to? I assume it has to run after the mount commands run during startup.

BD5321

4/30/24, 1:29 AM

After doing more searching I found that I can add the file autorun in the root directory of a volume and it will run after the volume is mounted so this answers the last part of my question. To me this is preferable and it looks like you can set a value for each mounted volume which is also preferable. 5% of a small volume is almost necessary to make sure the OS has the space it needs to do whatever it's doing with the disk, but for large volumes I could set a value of 1% for reserved space which is more reasonable.

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EN: Need to limit the amount of reserved space on disk I guess for trash

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