how much space is what using?

[Stumpy]

I am trying to figure out how to claw back some space on my hard drive
but am having a really hard time understanding what is taking up how
much space?

For example, I have one appvm that in the qubes manager is showing disk
usage as 173000MiB
sudo Baoab is showing me that / is using:
10.5gb
and df -f is showing me that / is using
11gb with 500gb free

and when i try to reduce private storage anything less than it is
already (it is set to 550000gb) the settings wont let me, I change it,
hit apply and it goes back to 550000gb, no matter if i try to change it
by 1 or 100gb, also regardless of if i have the appvm shutdown or not?

Am having a really hard time understanding this so any clarification
would be appreciated!

[Andrew David Wong]

It won't let you reduce the private storage capacity because that's a
dangerous operation. The system is protecting you from yourself. :)

If you just want to free up space, simply delete stuff you don't need
inside of AppVMs. That will free up space, even though the AppVM private
storage capacity remains the same. That's because it's total *capacity*,
not the amount of space actually being used. If I create a brand new
AppVM and immediately increase its private storage capacity to 500GB,
that doesn't mean 500GB is being used. Only if I actually fill that
AppVM with 500GB of data will that much actually be used on disk. Until
I do that, it's just a big empty vessel.

Now, if, for some unrelated reason, you really want to try to shrink the
private storage capacity (and risk losing data to do so), have a look at
this documentation:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/resize-disk-image/#decreasing-the-size-of-disk-images

Just remember that this is not at all necessary for saving disk space,
and it's probably a bad idea unless you really, really know what you're
doing. Most people will never need to do this. :)

--
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org