This is drive E:, a btrfs file system. Rustbelt reads it with its own driver (src/fs/btrfs.rs) but never writes to it: btrfs is read-only here. btrfs keeps everything in copy-on-write B-trees. A file's bytes live in "extents": small files (like this one) sit right inside the tree as inline extents, bigger ones in data blocks elsewhere on the disk. This image was made with --compress zlib, so most extents are compressed. Things to try: ls -l E:/ cat E:/big.txt | wc cat E:/hello-link cd E:/projects (a subvolume: a separate tree of its own) cp E:/hello.txt C:/ echo hi > E:/new.txt (fails: read-only)