Cannot recover storage capacity from appVMs or other sources

[apparatus]

@EmiliaAS

That is not the issue, the issue is, after doing that, I have gone through and deleted about 500gb of stuff, movies I ripped, screenshots etc etc, even a failed windows VM

Maybe set revisions_to_keep to 0 for this VM with large deleted files so your old revision with files that you deleted will be removed as well:

Best Practice for 1TB of files in private storage of one Qube?

What do you mean here? Delays or errors? Upd: I think I know what is happening. The volume-backup-revert is saving the private volume snapshot every time you shut down your qube. If the qube is large, it may be very slow. You can switch it off using qvm-volume config vmname:private revisions_to_keep 0