A1200 leaking disk space

[ghostwheel]

I noticed recently that the sum of all files on my memory card was much less than the space that they took up. Yesterday, I deleted some files to make space for a big video, took the video, and then deleted it, to discover that the files I had originally removed did not fit on the disk anymore, which made me suspicious.

So, I copied all files over to my computer, reformated the disk, and copied them back, for a gain of ~50MiB (on a 128MiB card)!

Before the operation, df reported
/dev/mmca1 124064 117360 6704 95% /mmc/mmca1
(i.e. 117MiB used)

whereas du reported
70606 /mmc/mmca1
(i.e. 70 MiB used)

After the operation, df reports
/dev/mmca1 123852 70590 53262 57% /mmc/mmca1
(i.e. 70 MiB used)

(I seem to have formated the disk a bit differently)
I am not sure what causes the leak. It could be a bug in the phone, or it could be that when I mount the disk as a USB device on linux and delete files, the space does not get freed.

[EvilGnome]

It is very possible that when "deleting" files or folders on the device from a linux system that the system just moves the "deleted" items to a hidden folder on the device called something like .<yourusername>-Trash. Using rm from terminal would truly delete the files. If you'd rather not use terminal, then after deleting you could view hidden files/folders (ctrl h in nautilus) and then delete that trash folder. There might also be settings for your desktop environment or file manager that can change these trash settings. Let me know what you find, and if you have any problems let me know what file manager you're using to delete the files and I'll see what I can figure out.