And why is that?

BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID!

- Is your router on?

- Yes.

- What color are the lights?

- There are no lights.

- Please turn the router on.

To be fair, customer service is useless either way. At least I can curse the AI into oblivion.

If you argue like that then neither intelligence nor societies exist. A the fundamental level, every neuron just computes its output from its inputs, quite predictably even. That doesn’t mean emergent behaviours cannot exist.

You sure want to die on this hill.

You can clear your denomination from your file. I don’t know if it survives in a changelog, though.

I think you underestimate the cost of shooting a real guy sitting at a table. Casting, lighting, filming, makeup, props, location, color correction all cost money. And I probably forgot about a few things. Film is ridiculously complex.

Latest theory I heard was:

A 2014 study found a correlation between striping and overlap with horse and tsetse fly populations and activity. Other studies have found that zebras are rarely targeted by these insect species. Caro and colleagues (2019) studied captive zebras and horses and observed that neither could deter flies from a distance, but zebra stripes kept flies from landing, both on zebras and horses dressed in zebra print coats. […] White or light stripes painted on dark bodies have also been found to reduce fly irritations in both cattle and humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra

In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.

Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.

I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.

Sounds like a regular programmer today.

Darwin was famously seasick, but also wanted to really look at birds and shit. Bad combination.

What distinguishes zebras from horses is that zebras live in anonymous herds. That is, they like to clump together to ward off predators, but they don’t know or like each other. They are not a uniform group with a leader. Horses on the other hand do have authorities and followers among them. And humans can hijack the role of the leader.

CGPGrey: The Real Reason We Don’t Ride Zebras (6:23)

It’s good you found some pathological examples, but I’m at the end of my rope here.

You can use these examples and the other information you gathered so far and ask specifically how these size discrepancies can be explained and maybe mitigated. I suggest more specialized communities for this such as !linux@lemmy.ml, !linux@programming.dev, !linux@lemmy.world, !linux4noobs@programming.dev, !linux4noobs@lemmy.world, !linuxquestions@lemmy.zip.

These differences really are insane. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can comment on why different tools differ so wildly in the total size they report.

I have never used BTRFS, so I must resort to forwarding googled results like this one.

Could you try compsize ~? If the Perc column is much lower than 100% or the Disk Usage column is much lower than the Uncompressed column, then you have some BTRFS-specific file-size reduction on your hands, which your external exFAT naturally can’t replicate.

du --count-links only counts hard-linked files multiple types. I assumed you had a symlink loop that rsync would have tried to unwrap.

For instance:

$ ls -l
foo -> ./bar
bar -> ./foo

If you tried to rsync that, you’d end up with the directories foo, bar, foo/bar, bar/foo, foo/bar/foo, bar/foo/bar, foo/bar/foo/bar, ad infinitum, in the target directory.

Personally, I have no more tips that those that have already been presented in this comment section. What I would do now to find out what’s going on is the age-old divide-and-conquer debugging technique:

Using rsync or a file manager (yours is Dolphin), only copy a few top-level directories at a time to your external drive. Note the directories you are about to move before each transfer. After each transfer check if the sizes of the directories on your internal drive (roughly) match those on your external drive (They will probably differ a little bit). You can also use your file manager for that.

If all went fine for the first batch, proceed to the next until you find one where the sizes differ significantly. Then delete that offending batch from the external drive. Divide the offending batch into smaller batches (select fewer directories if you tried transferring multiple; or descend into a single directory and copy its subdirectories piecewise like you did before).

In the end you should have a single directory or file which you have identified as problematic. That can then be investigated further.

I’d say you can trust that.

I’m sorry. I was stupid. If you had duplicates due to a file system loop or symlinks, they would all be under different names. So you wouldn’t be able to find them with this method.

You checked 385GiB of files by hand? Is that size made up by a few humongously large files?

I suggest using uniq to check if you have duplicate files in there. (uniq’s input must be sorted first). If you still have the output file from the previous step, and it’s called rsync-output.txt, do sort rsync-output.txt | uniq -dc. This will print the duplicates and the number of their occurrences.

Idk if rsync traverses symlinks and filesystems by default,

From the man page:

Beginning with rsync 3.0.0, rsync always sends these implied directories as real directories in the file list, even if a path element is really a symlink on the sending side. This prevents some really unexpected behaviors when copying the full path of a file that you didn’t realize had a symlink in its path.

That means, if you’re transferring the file ~/foo/bar/file.txt, where ~/foo/bar/ is a symlink to ~/foo/baz, the baz directory will essentially be duplicated and end up as the real directory /SSD/foo/bar and /SSD/foo/baz.

Let’s back up and check your assumptions: How did you check that the disk usage of your home folder is 385GiB and that there are 780GiB of free disk space on your external drive?