Both of them use Tumbleweed with a 35GB root partition, but the desktop uses an NVMe drive. So I decided to check the config files and they are identical, except for the QGROUP setting. On my laptop this is 1/0, on my desktop it is blank. But I don’t really know if i should just copy paste the 1/0 or if it needs to be something else, I can’t really figure out what exactly the 1/0 means. So I also don’t know if it even has anything to do with that in the first place.
I have been manually removing snapshots before updating for months now, just recently realized I don’t have to do this on my laptop. Would love to not have to do this on my desktop as well.
Right, sorry about that. You make a good point, I guess I could’ve just not found out what is using the space. It’s just that on every previous distros (including Leap but without using snapper) I used about 16GB for root without btrfs and it was always enough for what I install. I decided to go a bit over double for Tumbleweed after I read about snapshots, to make sure I’d have enough space for them. Combined with lots of space being freed up every time I delete a few of the snapshots before updates (around 4-6GB), I figured the remaining snapshots must be using a lot of space as well. But then, it doesn’t do that on my laptop so I can’t be sure. I already moved the cache folder for updates to another partition once I didn’t have enough space to download them anymore.
I usually check where my space goes with QDirStat but from what I understand it doesn’t work well with btrfs subvolumes. So I have no idea how to check how much space is actually being used by snapshots, other than just deleting all of them at once and checking how much space I suddenly have.
Well, in trying to figure out if it really is snapshots using all this space I’ve been reading a lot more documentation about snapper and btrfs quotas, and it’s probably working the same way as on my laptop now. I must have enabled quotas during installation there and not on my desktop.
So I went into the partitioner, selected the btrfs list item and clicked on edit, where the option “Enable Subvolume Quotas” is listed. I checked that box and ran snapper setup-quota after.
I can now check the size of my snapshots with btrfs qgroup show / , and I have the 1/0 parent qgroup just like on my laptop, which has been automatically added to snapper’s config file.
I’m guessing it will work now, but I won’t really know until I use it for a while. Either way, thanks for the replies, glad to have learned some new things again.