[Samba] Difference between real and reported disk usage

[Bjoern Baumbach]

Dear Cesare,

On 12/14/2012 03:51 PM, Berni CED wrote:
>> > I've retried commenting out this line and repeating the entire copy with
>> > robocopy: now the disk usage corresponds to the one reported by Windows and by
>> > "du -s -h --apparent-size".
> To summarize, in my case "strict allocate = yes" has caused samba server to use
> 123 GB do store 45 GB of effective data. That is there is a lot more wasted
> space (78 GB) than data (45 GB)!

This is by design.
With the strict allocate = yes Samba stops creating sparse files. If you
copy a sparse file with a real size of e.g. 100MB and a
reserved/allocated size of 1GB to a server with "strict allocate = yes",
the server writes 900MB trailing zeros to the file :-)

Please refer to smb.conf(5) manual page and look for "strict allocate".

Best regards,
Björn

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