Proxmox GUI disk space is only rising, not going down.

[max1486]

Hi there,

I have 3 VM's running on a Proxmox VE 6 installation using the OVH automatic installer. 1 of them is running qcow2 and the other two are running RAW. I have noticed an issue recently where qcow2 was never going down in size, even when using the shrink command so I then converted that VPS to RAW. The total file size of it now is 630GB solid which was what I allocated to it. The issue is that ls -lh shows the raw file as 630G and du -sh . shows it as 30G.

However, the GUI for 'local' (/var/lib/vz) partition is only rising whenever I download onto the servers, and it never goes down when I rm -rf the files I delete.

Any suggestions?

23.32% (185.16 GiB of 794.09 GiB) - It was 177GB prior to my download and after I deleted it, still 185GB - including an entire hypervisor reboot.

Upon further investigation, the RAW disk file is only ever increasing and it never gets smaller when I delete files. Why is it doing this?

Please note I am using XFS for the file system.

 

[BobhWasatch]

The raw file is probably sparse. When you create one it is all zero initially, which Linux can represent with only metadata. So it shows up in directory listings with the stated size but only uses a small number of disk blocks. This is called a sparse file. As you use the vm it writes to the file causing it to use actual disk space. Deleting a file inside the VM generally does not zero out the disk it was using on the backing storage.