I'm running an Ubuntu (10.04) Samba server on a local network. The server has a 50GB internal drive with only 24MB free. I've shared a folder /samba from that drive. I also have a 1TB NTFS external hard drive mounted to the system. There is a symbiotic link from the Samba shared folder on the nearly-full internal drive to the plenty-of-free-space external drive (i.e. /samba/external_hd).

I wish to copy a 3.25GB folder into the (remote) external hard drive, via a Mac (10.6.8).

The Mac reports (correctly) that there's 24MB free on the server, and so will not let me copy the folder on the Mac over to the external drive (dragging the folder into /samba/external_hd), failing with a "server does not have enough free space" error.

However, it seems that I can still scp the folder into the external drive, via the symbolic link.

Is there a reason as to why this is happening (and are there any ways to prevent it)?

Is this even good practice (to mount a drive and link into the directory)?