NTFS -> EXT4 migration, where did 120 GB go?

Solution 1:

After some fiddling about, I was able to reclaim a large amount of space with tune2fs:

wim@wim-ubuntu:~/Desktop$ df -h | grep sdc
/dev/sdc1             1.8T  1.7T  352M 100% /media/data
wim@wim-ubuntu:~/Desktop$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdc1 | grep 'Reserved block count'
Reserved block count:     24418900
wim@wim-ubuntu:~/Desktop$ sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdc1
tune2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
Setting reserved blocks percentage to 0% (0 blocks)
wim@wim-ubuntu:~/Desktop$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdc1 | grep 'Reserved block count'
Reserved block count:     0
wim@wim-ubuntu:~/Desktop$ df -h | grep sdc
/dev/sdc1             1.8T  1.7T   94G  95% /media/data

Apparently linux reserve 5% of new partitions for the root user and system services, so that when you run out of disk space, root can still log in and clean stuff up with system services running ok. Seems kind of bananas to me when the system services only need a hundred meg or so, and 5% of a 2TB drive is a $h17load more than that.. shrugs

This left me with 93.5 GB free, which still leaves about 30 gig unaccounted for, so if anyone has any more ideas feel free to chip in!

Solution 2:

Did you rsync your files also using the -H option? There may be hard links on the source drive, which will result in duplicated contents on the destination, unless you specify rsync to (try to) preserve the hard links.

This is especially true for e.g. Windows 7 system partition and Windows/winsxs (Windows side-by-side), which contains a lots of hard links to files in the directory hierarchy.