sudo cp -r /home/ /media/jim/Data\ BU3\ 5TB/
Using the above command, I copied my entire /home directory from my internal 1TB drive to an empty 5TB USB drive. There were no errors reported. The copy took several hours. When it finished, I compared the number of files and the number of gigs in the source /home directory to the same folder on the USB drive. They were wildly different. There were 155,000 files using 550 Gb's showing for the internal drive vs. 62,000 files using 330 Gb's reported for the USB drive. I was using the Nautilus file manage (GNOME nautilus 3.36.3). Note that both drives are Ext4. I then used the 'du' command to compare the /home directories on both drives. The number of gigabytes matched perfectly. Hence, I conclude that Nautilus was naughty. Can anyone shed any light on this?
Have you rebooted, then tested to see if the Nautilus reported sizes match?
Do you have File Indexing disabled?
Zorin OS uses ext4 which is a journaling file system. If a user checks the size or file count of a drive soon after performing a large volume transfer, then the report may include only what is written in the journal, rather than the main system, due to the indexing being an ongoing process that had not yet completed.
Thank-you for your response. I did restart Nautilus, but I did not restart the entire system. Yesterday, I recopied my /home directory to the USB drive using rsync. Today, Nautilus reported the source and target /home directories to be equal. I conclude that your suggestion that the indexes had not yet be updated is what happened. I knew about the indexes, but hadn't thought about them for years. Ay caramba!
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