I don't think I've ever asked a question on Linux Questions before. I hope I am doing it right. I've attached a file to show the problem, although right now it seems more of a mystery than a problem.

I'm currently running Mint 19. I'm more familiar with Debian but Debian stopped maintaining rednotebook.

Anyway, what I noticed today is that Gparted and the Mint file manager disagree about how much free space there is on my harddrive, by about 19 gb. I would really like to know why.

Can anyone help, please? Thanks for reading.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Technically they are both correct. ext4 by default when it is formatted reserves 5% for root which is supposed to reduce fragmentation and allow root to login when the filesystem becomes full.

380GB * .05 = 19GB. Gparted shows the total free space including reserved but the file manager does not. If you look at the output of the df -h command it is also missing the reserved space. You can safely reduce the amount of free space to like 1% if you need to free some up.

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Are you sure that the files displayed in the file manager window are on the same filesystem as /home?

I'd compare that to the output of the df -h command, which shows free space in all mounted file systems.

To be honest, I don't know where the two tools, gparted and the file manager, get their information from. You could be looking at a bug, or two different ways to calculate file system usage.

EDIT: Thanks to michaelk this is resolved, I think. There are indeed two ways to calculate free space.

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I would have to guess at partial files with holes
gparted looks at the allocated , and the file manager is looking at the 'when complete' file size.
that is just a wild guess, I don't know if ether actualy behave like that.

do you have any downloads that have not finshed yet?


Edit: ahh, ok yeah that 5% makes more sense

Hey, that was fast guys, thanks very much. I figured it was probably harmless like that, but I thought I should find out for sure. Now that I know how easy it is to ask a question, and how quick you guys are to answer, I just might ask another question. Thanks again.

[edit] To answer the question about files downloading, no, that was the first thing I thought of. I would like to point out that I am not a newbie. I am not an expert, but I generally get by and have been using Linux for 10 years now.

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