After long-term usage, one of my virtual disks seems to be irreversibly taking much more space in its host OS than actual usage in the guest OS. Since my laptop has only 1TB disk and no way to add other disks for now, I have to find a way to solve this before it consumes all disk space up.
Here is some information:
| Product | VMware® Workstation 16 Pro 16.2.5 build-20904516 |
| Host OS | Windows 11 Pro
|
| Guest OS | Linux 5.15.114-2-MANJARO |
| Disk type | 0 (single growable virtual disk) |
| Snapshots/disk chain | none |
| Disk usage in Guest | 92G |
| Disk format in Guest | 1 primary partition of etx4, 500GB capacity
|
| Disk file usage in Host | 244G |
What I have tried: defragmenting and shrinking, multiple times, it seems 244G is the best I can get.
Maybe another solution: create a new disk, partition, format, mount, and copy data from the old disk. I tried this on another smaller and irrelevant disk and it works fine - the newly created disk file takes 9G while its disk usage is 8.9G in the Guest OS, but it's the last thing I want to do with my home data disk.
Any better idea?
