Host: Ubuntu 24.04LTS
Guest: Lubuntu 24.04LTS
Guest has “Dynamically allocated differencing storage”.
The Virtualbox media manager says the Virtual Size is 25.00GB, but that the Actual Size is 11.96GB.
However, inside the guest, it reports that the 25GB disk — /dev/sda1 all allocated to / — is 99% full. It was showing 100% full (!) so I deleted some stuff.
I noticed the problem when I tried to create a directory and the system reported ‘not enough disk space’.
So the question is, why is VB reporting the wrong ‘Actual Size’?
Is there huge overhead from the snapshots?
And is it safe to enlarge the disk via the graphical interface (or VBoxManage modifyhd Lubuntu24.04LTS.vdi --resize 50000)?
I have plenty of room where I store the virtual machines:
df -h on host:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 6.1G 3.2M 6.1G 1% /run
efivarfs 128K 63K 61K 52% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 935G 553G 335G 63% /
tmpfs 31G 0 31G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 12K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
/dev/nvme1n1p2 2.0G 218M 1.6G 12% /boot
/dev/nvme1n1p1 1.1G 6.2M 1.1G 1% /boot/efi
/dev/mapper/VMs 937G 536G 354G 61% /home/alan/VMs
/dev/mapper/backupHDs 1.8T 1.3T 442G 75% /mnt/backupHDs
tmpfs 6.1G 212K 6.1G 1% /run/user/1000


