Arch Linux

usaradark

Member

Registered: 2024-06-15

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Fresh btrfs snapshots take up equal space to original

Lately, I've been running out of disk space. Doing a du shows that my `/home` snapshots have been taking up a lot of space. Actually, each snapshot is 200GB. The original `/home` directory itself is also 200GB. Snapshots aren't supposed to be taking up this much space, as I hadn't made any large deletions as of recently. I tried deleting all snapshots to create a fresh snapshot to see what would happen. My current understanding is that on a fresh creation, it should take up no space due to COW until a change has been made to the existing files. After creating the snapshot, I checked the disk space it's taking up and it's taking up 200GB. I checked my the `@.snapshots`, which snapshots `/`, and that too was taking up a lot of space, 100GB on each fresh snapshot creation.

This isn't normal, is it? If so, how might I go about troubleshooting this to figure out what is wrong? I am using Snapper.

I have been using btrfs for a while and I don't remember it working like this. The first snapshots on when I installed Archlinux remain small, so those have not changed, it's only the newly created ones.

edit - added historical usage of btrfs

Last edited by usaradark (2025-06-30 15:46:51)

-thc

Member

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 934

Re: [SOLVED] Fresh btrfs snapshots take up equal space to original

This Wiki article discourages the use of df/du in BTFRS.

usaradark

Member

Registered: 2024-06-15

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Fresh btrfs snapshots take up equal space to original

That's right, I completely forgot about that. I'll closer observe my system with that from here on. Thank you.