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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2024

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  • In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.

    Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.

    I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.








  • Personally, I have no more tips that those that have already been presented in this comment section. What I would do now to find out what’s going on is the age-old divide-and-conquer debugging technique:

    Using rsync or a file manager (yours is Dolphin), only copy a few top-level directories at a time to your external drive. Note the directories you are about to move before each transfer. After each transfer check if the sizes of the directories on your internal drive (roughly) match those on your external drive (They will probably differ a little bit). You can also use your file manager for that.

    If all went fine for the first batch, proceed to the next until you find one where the sizes differ significantly. Then delete that offending batch from the external drive. Divide the offending batch into smaller batches (select fewer directories if you tried transferring multiple; or descend into a single directory and copy its subdirectories piecewise like you did before).

    In the end you should have a single directory or file which you have identified as problematic. That can then be investigated further.








  • What does that mean?

    Imagine your hard drive like a giant cupboard of drawers. Each drawer can only have one label, so you must only ever store one “thing” in one drawer, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to label the thing accurately and end up not knowing what went where.

    If you have giant drawers (a large block size), but only tiny things (small files) to store, you end up wasting a lot of space in the drawer. It could fit a desktop computer, but you’re only putting in a phone. This problem is called “internal fragmentation” and causes files to take up way more space than it would seem they need.

    –––––

    However, in your case, the target block size is actually smaller, so this is not the issue you’re facing.