Missing space on data.

[Guest targetbsp]

Can someone help me understand something weird? Well it's weird to me as a Windows user. It might be something obvious to a Linux user - hence me asking!

I'm using Burstlams CM10 and have everything moved to an Ext partition with the included s2e.

But my free space on my data partition is 104 of 272MB

Using root explorer I've browsed every sub folder on /data and I'm either linked to my Ext partition (as shown by several hundred mb of free space) or the file sizes in the unlinked folders are of such insignificant size that they add up single digits of megabytes in total.

The missing space is about equivalent to the size of my dalvik cache but when I browse through to that it shows as linked to sd ext. And if i delete it from the ext partition, android sits and rebuilds it next boot so that's definitely where it is using it from.

So... does anyone knows where my missing space is? Not that it massively matters as I have redirected everything so I don't need the space anyway. It's just bugging me.

[Guest sej7278]

you probably had a 104mb dalvik-cache before moving to s2e, and android is reading free space on the now unused /data partition rather than the directory /sd-ext/data whose mountpoint is /data

basically what s2e does is mount a directory (/sd-ext/data) where a partition (/data) should have been.

i bet if you deleted the dalvik-cache from the real /data partition, it wouldn't rebuild on next boot, and probably would report more free space just to confuse things!

[Guest targetbsp]

But s2e appears to link subdirectories of /data rather than /data itself? You can individually choose what to move (apps, data, dalvik) and folders containing only small amounts of data aren't linked.

So I can browse the internal /data (as far as I can tell)

My best guess is also that there is a copy of my dalvik cache there. But I can't see it and nor can I logically see how it would exist. Windows for instance wouldn't allow me to have a link called dalvik-cache if a dalvik-cache folder already existed in data. Do Linux links work differently such that that would be possible in some way?

Edited September 12, 2012 by targetbsp

[Guest sej7278]

But s2e appears to link subdirectories of /data rather than /data itself? You can individually choose what to move (apps, data, dalvik) and folders containing only small amounts of data aren't linked.

So I can browse the internal /data (as far as I can tell)

My best guess is also that there is a copy of my dalvik cache there. But I can't see it and nor can I logically see how it would exist. Windows for instance wouldn't allow me to have a link called dalvik-cache if a dalvik-cache folder already existed in data. Do Linux links work differently such that that would be possible in some way?

you could have a /data/dalvik-cache on the actual partition with /sd-ext/dalvik-cache mounted over it, but can't really see how you'd see used space for the original partition then.

i've not linked anything other than /data/apps so not sure

[Guest targetbsp]

So that would be possible then? That's what is confusing me, because that wouldn't be possible in Windows (I think??)

Now the question is, how do I get at it to delete it? S2E in CM10 won't let me unlink the dalvik-cache unlike the CM7 version.

When I click on dalvik cache in root explorer I see the used space for the sd ext partition, that's fine. The problem is that the used space for the data shows as low - with nothing visible in root explorer or in terminal emulator (with my limited knowledge of linux commands!) showing anything significant using it.

If it's possible for a folder to exist and then effectively be hidden away by being linked elsewhere whilst the original folders contents still exists wasting space then I would say that is the cause. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this happened during a rom upgrade rather than during the setup of S2E.

[Guest targetbsp]

Ah ha! I think I have it. It's the app-asec folder. From the contents of this, I think it is copy protected apps. If I click through it, it shows the free space of my sd ext but my data space went down today by the size of prince of persia which is a game that ended up in that folder. And du from terminal emulator backs up that it is using a lot of data space.

I guess this is JB's new app protection thing? So my problem I guess is down to S2E not officially supporting CM10 yet and the version I have not handling that new feature. It still offers to move the empty app-private folder.

[Guest targetbsp]

Replacing S2E with a script that does mount the entirety of data rather than individual folders appears to have sorted things. Using Int2Ext now