Qubes keep ballooning up and take too much disk space if I use them for too long

User Support
1

I’ve read this : Lv of a qube takes more space than filesystem on it - #3 by otter2 but I don’t think it applies to me because I’m not running LVM (at least I don’t think so) and I don’t use an ssd so using trim won’t work I think.

So the problem is this: if I use a qube for a while it takes up too much space, but the thing is, the /home directory isn’t the culprit. For example in my personal qube, if I run du -hs /home, it returns only 583M, meanwhile the qube manager reports that the qube is taking up 4088.43 MiB of space. Where is this extra data coming from, and what can I do to delete it?

2

The root FS is writable, and it can take up as much space as the max system storage in the settings menu, default is 20GB.

The space is released when the VM is destroyed.

3

What is being written to it though? Over time I’ve only installed some packages from the AppVM, but that should get deleted once I shut down the VM, right? Why do I have to destroy (delete) the VM to regain space?

4

When you start a VM, it’s assigned a writable snapshot of root FS from the template used to create the VM. When you shut down the VM, the snapshot is destroyed and the space it used is released. Any data added or changed in the root FS will take up additional space, until you shut down the VM, it accumulates over time.

I’m not sure if you can use the manager to see the amount of physical space used by the VM, some filesystems will report the size of the template + /rw.