partition mounted at /home is 250+ GB, but all apps and fs analyzers running on /home say it is only 62 GB "apparent size". Any ideas before I nuke the partition?
Pop!_OS 22.04
on a 500GB SATA SSD
separate partitions with ext4 fs for the root and /home partitions.
I have Googled a lot, resized the home partition and filesystem a few times (from a liveboot USB) and run various analyzers but the problem persists.
If a mountpoint wasn't an empty directory before mounting another filesystem on it, the contents of that mountpoint will be shadowed by the contents of the other filesystem. So, if you mount other filesystems onto the one in question, this could cause your discrepancy, since the files are still there, just not present in the virtual filesystem tree. It's a common practice to set your mointpoints to immutable after creating them for this reason.
Somewhat more uncommonly, ext[234] allow the administrator to reserve a number of blocks for use by, in most cases, root — maybe you tune2fs'd your filesystem with some crazy value?
If I understand you correctly, then my applications would be looking at the /home folder on the root filesystem, which is <100 GB, unable to see the larger partition mounted in /home underneath it.
I can check by mounting the root fs but not the home partition from a live iso and checking for a /home in the contents of the root fs.
If I find what I expect there, the following should fix it:
move the files out of the /home folder to a backup location
delete /home folder in root fs
move files to large partition to be mounted in /home
Only thing I might have to check if it does not work is if this /home mount will then happen on booting the actual OS.
The second scenario does not ring a bell, but I'll keep it in mind in case this does not work.