'No space left' error while trying to copy files into container
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Hi all, I've made a Veracrypt container of 2 MB to securely store about 360 text files containing passwords which total just 286 KB. However, after copying 130 files I receive a persistent error "Error while copying [filename]. No space left on device." See attached screenshot.
I checked and the volume still has 1,6 MB of the total 2 MB of space available so the error does not make sense. Does anybody know what is going wrong here?
I'm using Veracrypt 1.24-update 7 on Linux Mint 20.1.
What filesystem fo you use for the volume? Is it a hidden volume? What does 'show more details' bring up?
Have you tried a bigger volume for testing? Would give it a try just to see how much space all your files would occupy.
Greets
Hi, thanks for your quick reply and suggestion, I really appreciate it.
Making a bigger volume and test that is indeed a good idea. I've made a 20 mb volume and all went well with copying the text files to there. The text files occupy 821 kB in that volume which is still way less than 2 mb so they should also fit in the 2 mb volume. See attached property windows of both volumes from the file manager. I formatted both of them with FAT which is the default setting. They are not hidden volumes. I don't see a 'show more details' option but there is a 'Volume properties' option in Veracrypt that may provide additional information if you're curious. See attached screenshots.
But it doesn't matter I guess when you have a 240 GB hard drive. I'm happy to just use the bigger volume and cancel the 2 mb one.
I think the reason is the cluster size of the volume. I created an FAT volume with 2 MiB in size. Its cluster size is set to 16k which means that even a 1 byte sized file will occupy 16k on the volume.
In case all your files (395 if I get it right) are all below 16k, this means that all these files would still occupy 16k x 395 > 6 MiB of space. So this would very likely be the issue here, which is a limitation of the volume's file system (FAT16 to be precise).
You can have a look at the cluster size by mounting your VeraCrypt volume, then, via terminal emulator, navigate to /media/ and type
ls -lwhich will show the cluster size in byte right to the user group.Greets
Interesting! You are right, the cluster size is indeed 16 kB, and that's fine. It is just confusing then that file explorer indicates that most of the space is still available when in fact it is full. Alas, nothing is perfect. Good to know for the future and thanks for sharing your knowledge.