It never happened to me before, but I'm unable to do a simple task such as compressing a 18.5 GB file on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 with any of the popular compressing tools such as gzip, bzip2 and 7z. All of them report a similar warning (not error) message claiming that the file size has changed during compression, when actually no other process is accessing to the file. For example, when trying to "tar-gz", the tool reports: File shrank by <nnnnnnnn> bytes; padding with zeros, exiting with the error code 1, which tar's manpage says it's due to a file change during compression:
exit code 1: Some files differ. If tar was invoked with the --compare (--diff, -d) command line option, this means that some files in the archive differ from their disk counterparts. If tar was given one of the --create, --append or --update options, this exit code means that some files were changed while being archived and so the resulting archive does not contain the exact copy of the file set.
The file is a VMDK, and of course the associated VM is completely shut down when I compress it. On the other hand, I've noticed that all the compressing tools fail when the compressed file reaches a size around 280 MB.
I've already checked other similar questions on ServerFault but still I don't get any hint to figure out what's happening. The most voted answer to the linked question says that this is not an error and that the compressing tool is just "simplifying" a bunch of zero bytes, but if I attempt to run the VM after decompressing the VMDK file, it fails claiming the disk is corrupted.
I'm completely stuck on this. Any ideas of what can be happening?
UPDATE
While trying to copy the file to another directory using the cp command, it dumped an I/O error while reading the file. On the other hand dmesg reported I/O errors while reading a specific block of the file. Everything points to be a disk error (although e2fsck says everything is OK and there are 0 bad blocks). Since I already have a backup of the VM, I will try to change the host computer's disk and reinstall a fresh copy of Ubuntu and see what happens. I keep this question posted until I get some results.