Hi, I'm new to the forums but have been using Unraid for close to 15 years now.  This is the first time I've run into an issue I haven't been able to resolve myself or with info from these forums so I figured I'd reach out to see if anyone can provide some guidance.

 

Recently, I renamed and moved a large number of media files (about 5TB) from one folder in a share to a number of new folders within that same share.  Basically, I was reorganizing them based on file name. 

 

I moved them using Windows Explorer in about 10 batches based on file name.  With the first batch I dragged and dropped to the new directory, I was surprised to notice that Windows was doing a copy instead of a move.  I cancelled this and dragged the files to the new directory with the right mouse button to ensure that I was doing a move and not a copy.  I was surprised that the move was going to take some time, but didn’t think much of it figuring that the files were stored on different disks and might have to be moved around, etc. 

 

I paused the transfer, and setup my additional moves in the same way, pausing each until they were all setup and then unpausing them to let them run in one batch.  I didn’t think these moves would go to my cache pool (1 TB), which they did, and maxed it out.  This caused Windows to throw a transfer error (I wish I’d noted it).  I ran the Mover to clear the cache drive, and clicked Try Again on each transfer and they completed without incident.  I made sure to keep running Mover every time the cache drive filled to ensure that I didn’t run into this issue again.

 

While the transfers were running, I noticed that the free space in my array was going down.  But I figured this would resolve after the files were all moved so I didn’t worry too much about it. Surprisingly, once all the moves were complete, the available disk space did not return.  I read some similar posts which suggested a restart would resolve this, but no such luck.  I also tried a Parity check, which had no errors and a file system check on each of the drives in my array, each of which returned zero errors.

 

I’ve heard of lost+found folders being created for orphaned files, but I’m not seeing any.  All of my files appear to have moved successfully, and are only present in the locations I’d expect them to be in.  I’ve also tried using the Unraid file manager to check each disk to see if there are any duplicates, etc., but I wasn’t able to spot any.

 

I have attached my diagnostics file.  Also, of note, I upgraded to Unraid 7.0 a few days before the file moves, but can’t see how that would make a difference.

 

I’m hoping someone has run into a similar issue and has suggestions as to how I can recover my lost disk space.

 

Thanks in advance

box-diagnostics-20250115-1415.zip

If it was really within the same share, the move should be instant, and never go to the pool, post a screenshot from Windows explorer showing exactly how you were doing it.

Thanks for your reply.  On a hunch, I ended up deleting all of the hardlinks I had for the files I moved.  No idea why, but this worked and I was able to reclaim all of the missing disk space.  No clue what happened, or why the hardlinks would have been taking up disk space, but I'm glad it's resolved.