on BTRFS filesystems the .snapshots folder is analyzed making the result unusable (showing hundreds of Terabytes in my case). it should be ignored thanks for a very useful utility greets philipp
Settings > Configure Filelight > Add your folder here.
Of course that would be a solution, but you have to add every .snapshot folder for every BTRFS Partition (wildcards don't seem to be supported, at least not in the GUI). And why should every user do this manually? Not exactly user friendly. BTRFS is the default filesystem on some popular distros (e.g. openSUSE) so beginners would also run into this issue.
I think then this should be marked as a feature request so that Filelight can ignore all folders named ".snapshot" or some other way to detect a BTRFS snapshots folder.
Eh, I'm 99.99% sure .snapshot is not a standard feature of btrfs or anything. Guess you should complain to the software that decide to litter like that. That being said, we'll not be filtering these out, there are valid use cases for wanting to know the size tree of a subvolume.
the tool is called snapper, it makes use of BTRFS' copy on write capabilities. It keeps snapshots as subfolders in the /.snapshot folder. Changed files are stored there, all other files are referenced as hardlinks in each snapshot. I think that counting all hardlinks as regular sized files makes filelight unusable. The displayed size of all files is way bigger than my hard drive for example. Of course this is not an easy situation because it's hard to say where the hardlinked file should be counted. Not counting it at all doesn't make sense either. That's why i suggested to ignore the /.snapshot folder, because it's the one folder where regular users get lots of hardlinks.