Recover free space from deleted files

[texneus]

This is probably a long shot asking here because I don't think it's a SageTV issue, but has anyone observed after a recording is deleted in SageTV that the file space is not freed? In other words, when I delete a 5GB recording (for example), I would expect the free space reported by both the OS and SageTV to increase by 5GB, perhaps not immediately, but certainly within a few minutes. Instead it stays constant then keeps going down as other shows are recorded.

This seems to occur at the OS level. IOW, the file is definitely deleted (easily confirmed) but even the OS doesn't show free space being recovered. I suspected their might be a "recycle bin" somewhere, but it seems that Ubuntu-Server doesn't have one (at least not that I can see?). I found I can reclaim the space by unmounting the drive and fschk it. It doesn't report any errors but when remounting the space is back. Yesterday, when I noticed this was happening recovered 200GB(!!) doing this (representing perhaps 1-2 months of deleted recordings), but afterwards confirmed it's still not reclaiming space on its own.

Setup: Ubuntu-server in a VM, two EXT4 recording drives (pass through, not virtual), no media drives. SageTV 7.1.9 in Docker-CE.

Ideas?

[stuckless]

My understanding is that sagetv doesn't do an immediate delete. If you check back later you'll likely see the space is freed up.

[texneus]

This is something different. The files are definitely deleted, but the space will not be reported free for ...(as far as I can tell)... ever. It requires a fschk to get it back. This is more like the sectors are never marked as available once the file deleted.