`qemu-img info` reports an incorrect actual-size when the underlying posix filesystem has transparent compression qemu-img info reports the same thing as `du`*1024: $ qemu-img info --output json ./my.qcow2 | jq '."actual-size"' 558619648 $ du ./my.qcow2 545527 ./my.qcow2 $ echo $((558619648 / 545527)) 1024 and this is correct in terms of bytes on disk, but due to transparent compression implemented by the filesystem, it is not the actual byte count: $ du -h --apparent-size ./my.qcow2 1346568192 my.qcow2