Why doesn’t file deletion free disk space?
In most cases it does, except for the following scenarios: In some desktop configurations files are not deleted for real but moved into a ‘Trash’ or ‘.Trash-username’ directory in the root of the partition. When these directories are emptied then the disk space is reclaimed. By design, Linux and Unixes free the disk space of the deleted files permanently only if no software keeps them open anymore. NTFS is able to store small files and directories in fixed size (1 kB) MFT records (inodes). When such files are deleted then the MFT records are marked free for reuse or for undelete, and no space can be freed. Status: Not NTFS-3G problem.