gregrwm cried from the depths of the abyss... > > what fs? ext4 > btrfs et al have features that could be holding on to the content. > > what sort of backups? BackupPC et al keep hardlinks to everything. you can explore what's allocated with du.. The directory contained 5 backpus of the content of our email archiving server (mirapont razor safe 170). I have check using du with the --max-depth=1 option to keep it easy to read, and the totals don't add up?