Can you help me figure out why my VM is growing?
I have an M1 MacBook Air. I use UTM to run a Debian 11 virtual machine.
After the initial setup, updating and upgrading, installing Firefox and a few small programs, (I almost called them apps, d'oh), the Debian.utm file size was about 6GB. Now, less than a month later, it's almost 9GB.
The VM size increases after each use. I haven't downloaded or installed anything close to 3GB worth. I have downloaded files, then put them into the trash and emptied the trash, could the trash not be emptying properly?
I have run ncdu, but nothing stands out. When I drill down into /usr and into each large folder, no sub folder is larger than a few 100MB. I can't see any big files lurking.
I've googled using many search terms, but I can't get past results that are about how to increase the size of a VM that is running out of room.
Thanks very much for reading this, any ideas?
How much space did you provision for the VM? My guess is that even though it's taking up 6GB on disk you told the VM it has much more space - perhaps 20GB? When it writes incidentally to a virtual sector farther out in the disk it needs to expand the real space under the host disk. Again, that's just a guess. Essentially, the space is being taken up by a lot of unneeded zeros. If you really don't want the disk to grow you could provision a smaller disk.