update 2: The Linux community has suggested that I use a tar file to backup, as this preserves symlinks. With that, the home directory now takes up just 290 ish GiB, as it should. Now I will be distro hopping, wish me luck!
update: I was able to copy it! There are still some folders that are really big (as many have said, it is probably because symlinks aren’t supported in exFAT. When I transfer these files over to btrfs, will the symlinks come back or are they permanently gone?) but, with the uninstallation of Steam and Kdenlive (each taking a ridiculous amount of storage), removing a couple games I don’t really play, and removing old folders that lingered around from already uninstalled programs means I now have enough space to fit my home folder in the SSD (like 23 GiB left, so the lack of symlinks still hurts, but still, it fits!)
When running
rsync -Paz /home/sbird "/run/media/sbird/My Passport/sbird"
As told by someone, I run into a ran out of storage error midway. Why is this? My disk usage is about 385 GiB for my home folder, and there is around 780 GiB of space in the external SSD (which already has stuff like photos and documents). Does rsync make doubly copies of it or something? That would be kind of silly. Or is it some other issue?
Note that the SSD is from a reputable brand (Western Digital) so it is unlikely that it is reporting a fake amount of storage.
EDIT: Wait, is it because my laptop SSD is BTRFS and the external SSD is exFAT? Could that be the issue? That would be kind of weird, why would files become so much more bigger with the external SSD?
Thanks everyone for your help to troubleshoot! It was super helpful! Now I need to go to bed, since I’ve been up so late it’s already tomorrow!
using the command returns 512 for the external SSD and 4096 for the SSD in my laptop. What does that mean?
Imagine your hard drive like a giant cupboard of drawers. Each drawer can only have one label, so you must only ever store one “thing” in one drawer, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to label the thing accurately and end up not knowing what went where.
If you have giant drawers (a large block size), but only tiny things (small files) to store, you end up wasting a lot of space in the drawer. It could fit a desktop computer, but you’re only putting in a phone. This problem is called “internal fragmentation” and causes files to take up way more space than it would seem they need.
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However, in your case, the target block size is actually smaller, so this is not the issue you’re facing.
Means a file that’s one byte in size will take at minimum 512 bytes on the external disk, but 4 KB on the internal one. If it were the other way around, that would partially explain the difference in space used.
In any case, I doubt it that the block sizes would make so much difference in typical usage.