When running

rsync -Paz /home/sbird "/run/media/sbird/My Passport/sbird"

As told by someone, I run into a ran out of storage error midway. Why is this? My disk usage is about 385 GiB for my home folder, and there is at least 800 GiB of space in the external SSD (which already has stuff like photos and documents). Does rsync make doubly copies of it or something? That would be kind of silly. Or is it some other issue?

Note that the SSD is from a reputable brand (Western Digital) so it is unlikely that it is reporting a fake amount of storage.

  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    8 hours ago

    You checked 385GiB of files by hand? Is that size made up by a few humongously large files?

    I suggest using uniq to check if you have duplicate files in there. (uniq’s input must be sorted first). If you still have the output file from the previous step, and it’s called rsync-output.txt, do sort rsync-output.txt | uniq -dc. This will print the duplicates and the number of their occurrences.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      0·
      8 hours ago

      when using uniq nothing is printed (I’m assuming that means no duplicates?)

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        I’m sorry. I was stupid. If you had duplicates due to a file system loop or symlinks, they would all be under different names. So you wouldn’t be able to find them with this method.

        • sbird@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          1·
          7 hours ago

          running du command with --count-links as suggested by another user returns 384G (so that isn’t the problem it seems)

          • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
            1·
            7 hours ago

            du --count-links only counts hard-linked files multiple types. I assumed you had a symlink loop that rsync would have tried to unwrap.

            For instance:

            $ ls -l
foo -> ./bar
bar -> ./foo

            If you tried to rsync that, you’d end up with the directories foo, bar, foo/bar, bar/foo, foo/bar/foo, bar/foo/bar, foo/bar/foo/bar, ad infinitum, in the target directory.