Mar 14, 2018#Tutorial#qcow2#Virtual Machine#KVMHow to reclaim free space/shrink qcow2 file?Qcow2 file grows overtime; even if we delete files and snapshots. It still does not reduce the file size. The only way to that is to fill the disk with zero and then convert the disk to qcow2. Guest Do a disk free command df -h We need to fill root and home with zero. dd if=/dev/zero of=/mytempfile bs=10M; rm -f /mytempfile dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/mytempfile bs=10M; rm -f /home/mytempfile Shutdown shutdown -h now Host qemu-img convert -O qcow2 vm_learn.qcow2 vm_learn_new.qcow2 Edit guest and use the newly created qcow2 disk. virsh edit vm_learn