How to free up space occupied by VirtualBox machine?

Question

Vagrant

Good afternoon.

I use a virtual machine and as I use it, the machine file has grown to a size of 40 gigabytes, the machine responds to the "du -h --max-depth=1" command at the root with 16G.
Actually, the question is how to find what occupies the remaining 26 gigabytes and can they be deleted? Or maybe this is the norm and there is nothing to be done?

Windows 10 system, Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine (Homestead)

Thank you.

Answer 1

You need to follow the steps of this instruction
1. Fill empty space with zeros using dd if=/dev/zero of=~/zeros bs=4M status=progress
2. Run VBoxManage.exe modifymedium disk "C:\path\to\disk.vdi " --compact to discard nulls.