Wrong available disk space displayed

steamopen reviewed

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#3881 · opened 2015-06-13 by MightyCreak · updated 2024-12-08 · 5 comments · github

MMightyCreak 2015-06-13 github

Hi!

I've moved my SteamApps directory to another place on my SSD drive, and then created a symbolic link to this directory, like this:

cd ~/.local/share/Steam && ln -s /fastdrive/SteamApps

But now in Steam, when I want to install a new game, the available disk space is wrong. It shows the available disk space of ~/.local/share/Steam instead of ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps.

Here is the output of df -h for each directory:

$ df -h ~/.local/share/Steam/
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5       827G  501G  284G  64% /home

$ df -h ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps 
Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-fastdrive  172G   83G   81G  51% /fastdrive

I tried to chose a different directory in the dropdown list, but it says I don't have the rights, which is weird since the directory has more rights than ~/.local/share/Steam (755 vs 705). But well, that's another story.

Jjurf 2018-10-01 github

Yeah, encountered this too, Steam should really df inside steamapps, not the parent directory, when installing games.

Nnanonyme 2018-10-01 github

Just checking: so you did actually --filesystem=/fastdrive/SteamApps and link it inside the Flatpak container, right? (imo it's to be honest better idea to add it as a Steam library through client than to add symlinks)

Jjurf 2018-10-01 github

In my case there were no symlinks involved, but it’s the same issue, symlink or not.

DDDoctorzeus 2023-05-03 github

For me I have 100GB less than is available (not sure if this is an intentional safety mechinism. No symlinks other than the default created one for $HOME/.steam/steam -> $HOME/.local/share/Steam . Not sure if this is an intentional "feature"..

Hhar7an 2024-12-08 github

Can we please have an option to entirely disable or ignore this up-front free space check? I deliberately chose to mount steamapps/common and steamapps/downloading from a separate drive, because that uses another FS than my main host with different mount options set. I do not want the other subfolders from steamapps/ on that same disk though, because I'd like to snapshot these along with my hosts rootfs so I don't lose savegames any more (stored in steamapps/compatdata, for example) because in the past the cloud sync has deleted a bunch of files I held very dear in fact.

Given the amount of modern file systems out there (XFS, Btrfs, ZFS, you name it...), I feel like the assumptions you're making about free space being available don't hold any more. If df tells me there are x GB available, there may well be more space in reality due to compression or reflinks (for example).

I think it'd be fair if you warned users that their storage may be insufficient, but outright disabling installation in that case is too harsh IMO.

Nothing extracted yet.