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EightEqualsD

Member

Registered: 2026-01-27

Posts: 13

Lost games folder - Steam

Hey,

I recently been having troubles with setting up graphics drivers on my laptop and ended up breaking my steam install alongside it.

launching steam would simply not do anything, whether through terminal or app launcher, nothing happened not even an error being shown.

I ended up deleting and reinstalling Steam a few times either with 'pacman -R' or with '-Rns'.

Before it broke, I had downloaded more than a few games to get the installed library going and test if proton worked by trying to run different games. Now I think the space used to store them was abandoned and I don't know how to fix it/find it.

I deleted the ~/.steam/ and ~/.local/share/Steam/ directories yet my system still thinks it has over 200gb allocated somewhere.

Is there a way for me to recover the space without having to rebuild?

"""
fastfetch
    Disk (/): 273.06 GiB / 930.50 GiB (29%) - btrfs

ncdu (from /)
    *Total disk usage:  24.5 GiB   Apparent size: 128.0 TiB   Items: 704,872
"""

Last edited by EightEqualsD (2026-01-28 15:52:33)

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 1,938

Re: Lost games folder - Steam

btrfs - check snapshots! if you have an older snapshot still contain the data deleting them in a newer one doesn't release the space until the older snashop is expunged

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,535

Re: Lost games folder - Steam

There's also the question of how you deleted them. If you used some GUI file manager, chances are they got moved to the trash instead of deleted.

EightEqualsD

Member

Registered: 2026-01-27

Posts: 13

Re: Lost games folder - Steam

There's also the question of how you deleted them. If you used some GUI file manager, chances are they got moved to the trash instead of deleted.

No gui, all installs and deletions done from terminal

EightEqualsD

Member

Registered: 2026-01-27

Posts: 13

Re: Lost games folder - Steam

btrfs - check snapshots! if you have an older snapshot still contain the data deleting them in a newer one doesn't release the space until the older snashop is expunged

Ahh yep I think this is it, running 'sudo btrfs filesystem du -s /home/.snapshots' gets me the following

     Total   Exclusive  Set shared  Filename
   1.48TiB     8.33GiB   253.55GiB  /home/.snapshots

The question now is how do I remove this.. and is it worth it?
Btrfs seems to be able to manage them on its own so am I wrong to believe it can clean this without needing any more of my input?

If I do need to manage this manually, how would I go about doing so?
From what I know so far, the following command should be able to delete these snapshots but I keep running into errors such as 'dir not empty' or 'Could not statfs: No such file or directory' depending on my working dir and/or what/how I wrote the command.

sudo btrfs subvolume delete /home/.snapshots/*

Last edited by EightEqualsD (2026-01-30 19:13:15)