08-01-2009, 12:25 PM

Hi all.

Instead of a comical and friendly introduction, it's probably easier for us all if I cut to the chase and describe the problems.

Problem 1 (Mac Mini):

• If I 'Get info' for my 'Macintosh HD' it tells me the used space is 18.1GB (Fig 1.1).
• If I select all the folders in my 'Macintosh HD' (i.e. Applications, Library, System, User Guides and Information, Users) and add up the sizes of them all, it equals 14.18 (Fig 1.2).
• This is all a problem because I now wan't to start using time machine with my new 2TB Western Digital HDD but when I start a time machine backup it is backing up 18.1GB (Fig 1.3). What's up with that?

Fig 1.1 - Fig 1.1
Fig 1.2 - Fig 1.2
Fig 1.3 - Fig 1.3

Problem 2 (White Macbook):

• If I 'Get info' for my 'Macintosh HD' it tells me the used space is 34.3GB (fig 2.1).
• If I select all the folders in my 'Macintosh HD' (i.e. Applications, Library, System, User Guides and Information, Users) and add up the sizes of them all, it equals 24.17GB (fig 2.2).
• This is all a problem because I now wan't to start using time machine with my new 2TB Western Digital HDD, (in this case I will be doing that wirelessly), but when I start a time machine backup it is backing up 34.3GB (fig 2.3). What's up with that?

Fig 2.1 - Fig 2.1
Fig 2.2 - Fig 2.2
Fig 2.3 -

Problem 3 (WD 500GB External HDD):

This is the HDD that has been plugged into my mac mini for the last year. It has been used basically to store backups and all the media. The mac mini is like a server. However, there would be time that I would need to connect it to the PC so when I first started my setup the easiest thing was for me to format it as FAT32 - (but now I say good riddance to FAT32 and will be using the necessary software to read Mac format on PC if necessary).
Once again cutting straight to the point, I have been transferring hundreds of GB off this drive and now guess what the size used on disk is - 582.83GB (Fig 3.1) - what the ****?!!?!!
So I selected all the folders inside the drive, calculated their sizes and guess what, it should be 640KB (Fig 3.2).

So I used this Disk Utility to Erase the disk... and it had no effect.
I should mention at this point that when I used this Disk Utility to Erase the disk, it took about 10 seconds before everything appeared done.

As I've decided that I'm going to sell this drive on ebay, I figured I might as well see what happens when I connect it to my PC laptop and format it to NTFS. It is taking a good 7hours+ and I can't tell you the reported size yet because it has not finished - sounds like this will do the job though.

Fig 3.1 -Fig 3.1
Fig 3.2 - Fig 3.2

Problem 4 (WD 2TB External HDD):

Quite simply; When I recieved this HDD it had 300mb+ on it. Does anyone know why? Fair enough though, because we all know that you should format any new HDD that you recieve. So I did that using the Erase function in Disk Utility. (Note that the HD came formatted for Mac, and I was obviously keeping it formatted as Mac OS extended Journaled). But wait, still 300mb+ on there?!?!?!
And now let's take a look at the sizes.
The reported used size on disk is 581.02GB (Fig 4.1). Now if I calculate the size of all the folders in the drive we get 532.33GB!!?!?! (Fig 4.2)

Fig 4.1 - Fig 4.1
Fig 4.2 - Fig 4.2



Am I missing something??!?!

Does Mac not delete things properly??

What could possibly be going!



Mainly in regards to the 2TB external hd - The reason this is all an issue, as you can imagine, is because I don't want precious gigabytes going to waste. I have an extremely large music collection and now that I have enabled RAID1 I actually only have 1TB of space for my media and time machine backups.




Thank you so much in advance for any help you can offer.! (Perhaps I am just missing something really simple).
Thank you for taking the time to read and reply

Mike

08-01-2009, 01:02 PM

Too much to digest.... You need to consolidate your question and simplify it or you're not going to get many replies. You also need to understand how hard drive space is calculated, and about hidden files\folders. Start with accessing the Wikipedia and then some Google searches for more information. What you're experiencing with HDD space is normal.

Regards.

08-01-2009, 01:18 PM

Originally Posted by chscag

Too much to digest.... You need to consolidate your question and simplify it or you're not going to get many replies. You also need to understand how hard drive space is calculated, and about hidden files\folders. Start with accessing the Wikipedia and then some Google searches for more information. What you're experiencing with HDD space is normal.

Regards.

Thanks for your reply. But how can I consolidate it? I guess if it is difficult to answer the 4 sections then I would be grateful if anyone could perhaps address 1 section.

I do know about hidden files/folders but I do not believe this is normal, particularly in the case of the 500GB Western Digital HD addressed in Problem 3. And if it is normal, I would really like to know where that unknown 4GB/10GB is appearing from in each case.

08-01-2009, 02:38 PM

My first quick guess is...what your doing when checking the sizes sounds logical...but you're probably missing some stuff when you do a "Get Info" on all of the folders. A 10 gig difference is pretty huge, you must have missed something.

If Time Machine backed up the same amount of data as what "Get Info" tells you is in your hard drive...then at least you know you have a successful backup.

It could even be something silly, like a large bunch of stuff in your trash can.

- Nick

Edit: You could also have a large amount of "stuff" stored on your desktop, that's not getting counted when you do the total from all of the individual folders in your Figure #2.2.

08-01-2009, 02:48 PM

Originally Posted by pigoo3

My first quick guess is...what your doing when checking the sizes sounds logical...but you're probably missing some stuff when you do a "Get Info" on all of the folders. A 10 gig difference is pretty huge, you must have missed something.

If Time Machine backed up the same amount of data as what "Get Info" tells you is in your hard drive...then at least you know you have a successful backup.

It could even be something silly, like a large bunch of stuff in your trash can.

- Nick

Thanks for the reply Nick. Yeh I guess I must be missing something, but have to work out what it is. If you see my other posts then you will see that it's happening on my Mac Mini too.

True that I will have a successful backup, but I don't want to be backing up 10GB more than I need to be because I need every gigabyte I can get for my media collection.

Mike