What is eating my HDD space?

[speedygonzalez]

Have just tried a bit more experimentation, I plugged a 128gb usb/hdd into rear usb port this I had formatted on my pc to ext3. Went into setup/vix/mount-manager and mounted as usb, went to timeshift settings and set location for timeshift as the usb drive I had just mounted, checked information/devices and exactly 120gb free. Then I tried pause of live tv on hd channel and left it for 15 minutes before checking information/devices which stated 650mb had been used 119.35 gb free. Went back to tv and switched channels then back to information/devices and free space now shown as 120gb. Next tried timeshift on hd channel for approx same period of time and again around 650mb of space had been used, then disabled timeshift followed by channel change and return to information/devices to find disk space had again returned to 120gb. None of the unusual issues of disappearing hdd space were present, apart from location ie external usb rather than internal hdd the only difference in set up is my internal hdd is ext4 compared to the ext3 format I just tried. Is it the type of filesystem used causing issues

I might have misunderstood what you are saying, but I have already tried pointing timeshift to a USB stick a couple of days ago. Like you what I found was the freespace in the usb stick behaved normally as expected, and the timeshift files in the stick looked perfectly normal also. However, the space loss issue remains, at the internal hdd.

I think what happens, is as long as you have an internal hdd, the system would still use the hdd as workspace, irrespective where the timeshift directory is, and it is the release of the invisible workspace after use, not the timeshift files, that is buggy, and is causing the hdd space loss.

Cheers!