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.

  • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    Simple: Exfat does not support symbolic links. So every file that’s just a symbolic link on your btrfs filesystem is getting copied in full (the link is being resolved) to your Exfat drive.

    Solution don’t use Exfat. For backups from btrfs, I recommend using btrfs with compression enabled.

    Also don’t forget to rebalance your btrfs partitions regularly to reclaim lost space! Also, delete old snapshots!

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      That makes a lot of sense. I can’t reformat the external SSD though, since it has a bunch of other files and needs to be used by my family (who are mostly Windows users)