Comment by Feathercrown
3 days ago
Using reserved space is still using space. Creating a folder is using up some portion of the reserved space until it will need to be expanded and take up more free space on the disk. Preemptively allocating that reserved space doesn't make the folder not take up space. If I create a file on my desktop, is it not taking up any space because I haven't yet had to expand my partition size or get another disk?
> Using reserved space is still using space.
Yes. But not using space from the pot that people are usually meaning when they talk about available space, the amount listed in the `avail` column in the output from `du`, or the space free number displayed by Windows Explorer and other GUI file managers.
Not that it usually makes much difference in the grand scheme of things, outside of made up examples like those mentioned above, or specific cases like file-per-message mail/usenet stores where you could easily run it of inodes before running out of main storage space on a filesystem and small files not taking more than the one inode (no extra storage block) could save a significant amount of main space in total.