I am on Arch Linux and have a Windows 10 virtual machine which I orignially created with gnome-boxes. I think it uses libvirt. Currently I run it with virsh.
I noticed that the disk image representing a 40G volume for my Windows machine is 93G. This is the disk section of the XML definition of the virtual machine:
<disk type="file" device="disk">
<driver name="qemu" type="qcow2" cache="writeback"/>
<source file="/home/ms/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images/win10" index="2"/>
<backingStore/>
<target dev="hda" bus="sata"/>
<alias name="sata0-0-0"/>
<address type="drive" controller="0" bus="0" target="0" unit="0"/>
</disk>
And this is the description from the virsh GUI:
And this is the real file size:
~ ls -lh /home/ms/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images/win10
-rwxr--r-- 1 ms ms 93G 10. Feb 11:02 /home/ms/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images/win10
I would like to understand why there is this difference between the volume size on disk and what Windows and virsh report as the volume size. Eventually I would like to decreease the size.
Thank you for any help in advance.
