And why is that?

BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID?

- Is your router on? - Yes. - What color are the lights? - There are no lights.

To be fair, customer service is useless either way. At least I can curse the AI into oblivion.

If you argue like that then neither intelligence nor societies exist. A the fundamental level, every neuron just computes its output from its inputs, quite predictably even. That doesn’t mean emergent behaviours cannot exist.

Did you not notice that the shirt has custom writing on it?

Boy, I recently had to look into the Java backend to figure out… something. I can’t remember.

It turns out that they needed to inject a bean into their class which was itself calling a factory, which according to documentation, instantiated three other classes just to make a fucking HTTP request! What’s worse, that clusterfuck of a (fairly standard) library required the base URL to be declared separately from the actual paths, and both the base URL needed to end with a slash, and each path must begin with one. Every reasonable programmer would assume that this is a mistake because the final path would end up with two slashes, but the library actually required that.

Meanwhile, frontend: fetch('url').then(r => r.json()).then(beHappy)

You can clear your denomination from your file. I don’t know if it survives in a changelog, though.

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.

It’s good you found some pathological examples, but I’m at the end of my rope here.

You can use these examples and the other information you gathered so far and ask specifically how these size discrepancies can be explained and maybe mitigated. I suggest more specialized communities for this such as !linux@lemmy.ml, !linux@programming.dev, !linux@lemmy.world, !linux4noobs@programming.dev, !linux4noobs@lemmy.world, !linuxquestions@lemmy.zip.

But I can critisize it for having only one sharp edge instead of 2. Or for being too short or too long. Or for having a handle that’s not shaped well for my hand. (That last metaphor is probably the correct one for the sentiment I’m going for.)

These differences really are insane. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can comment on why different tools differ so wildly in the total size they report.

I have never used BTRFS, so I must resort to forwarding googled results like this one.

Could you try compsize ~? If the Perc column is much lower than 100% or the Disk Usage column is much lower than the Uncompressed column, then you have some BTRFS-specific file-size reduction on your hands, which your external exFAT naturally can’t replicate.

Error: Too many unprocessed floats.

No; since every user defines the perfect program differently. Which should be the default behaviour(s)?

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.

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.

I’d say you can trust that.

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.

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.

Idk if rsync traverses symlinks and filesystems by default,

From the man page:

Beginning with rsync 3.0.0, rsync always sends these implied directories as real directories in the file list, even if a path element is really a symlink on the sending side. This prevents some really unexpected behaviors when copying the full path of a file that you didn’t realize had a symlink in its path.

That means, if you’re transferring the file ~/foo/bar/file.txt, where ~/foo/bar/ is a symlink to ~/foo/baz, the baz directory will essentially be duplicated and end up as the real directory /SSD/foo/bar and /SSD/foo/baz.

Let’s back up and check your assumptions: How did you check that the disk usage of your home folder is 385GiB and that there are 780GiB of free disk space on your external drive?