Copy windows10 vm take up all space in disk

1

I have an win10 vm, the disk is configured with 200G space:

danny@home:~$ incus config show win10
architecture: x86_64
config:
  limits.cpu: "8"
  limits.memory: 10GiB
  volatile.cloud-init.instance-id: 6761ecc1-9e65-4be0-9dad-2f99b68b2768
  volatile.eth0.hwaddr: 00:16:3e:d5:4a:81
  volatile.eth1.hwaddr: 00:16:3e:94:a6:50
  volatile.last_state.power: STOPPED
  volatile.uuid: a202bddb-cd29-4774-9072-58d901603349
  volatile.uuid.generation: a202bddb-cd29-4774-9072-58d901603349
  volatile.vsock_id: "3449872487"
devices:
  eth1:
    name: eth1
    nictype: bridged
    parent: lxdbr0
    type: nic
  install:
    boot.priority: "10"
    source: /home/danny/tools/lxd/win10.lxd.iso
    type: disk
  root:
    path: /
    pool: default
    size: 200GiB
    type: disk
  vtpm:
    path: /dev/tpm0
    type: tpm
ephemeral: false
profiles:
- default
- macvlan-enp34s0
stateful: false
description: ""

the actual usage in the windows machine is way less:
image

but when I try to copy it , it will take up all the 224G space left on my disk.

2

What storage driver are you using?

The problem with virtual machine disks (as opposed to containers) is that to the outside world, it may not be visible how much space is actually used. There’s basically a 200GiB file that’s your disk which is passed to the VM, whether the VM uses 100MiB or 100GiB off of that can’t always be detected.

Storage drivers with proper copy on write (btrfs, zfs, lvm, ceph) should generally handle that the best. The dir storage driver is likely to have some difficulties, especially if copying over the network.