Folders displaying wrong size

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Hi

Can anyone tell me why some of my folders are displaying the wrong size info.

For example my desktop has a few items on there yet in my home folder it is displaying the desktop as having 1.1GB of files

Another folder in my home folder which is empty is showing as having 1.26gb of files within

I ran disk warrior today and disk repair from disk and it hasn't rectified the problem - wondered if anyone else had this issue and have solved it

many thanks in advance for any info/help

Nic
 

eric


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welcome to the forums!

how are you seeing how much space is being used by these folders? get info or another way?
 
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welcome to the forums!

how are you seeing how much space is being used by these folders? get info or another way?

Thanks for the welcome - do people post intros on this forum?

When i open my home folder up I view the folder as a list which gives me 4 columns including a size colum, in the size column it is giving me these rogue size values for the folders but also if I go to get info it gives me the same value also

Its not a major problem but it just bugs me as I like to keep everything tidy :)
 

eric


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well that's weird.

i checked mine just to see if there may be something hidden that's counting towards your large desktop folder size. i don't have anything on mydesktop, and that includes hard drive icons. my desktop shows up as 24Kb ;).

so i guess that theory isn't it...

have you trashed anything and not emptied the trash, or do you keep a lot of folders on your desktop? perhaps there are hidden files that are using up some disk?
 
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My desktop currently has a couple of word files and pdf's about 1 - 2mb worth fo files, everything in the trash is empty, its a mystery to me, I have searched on the web for possible answers but found nothing

I'm not a Mac numpty but I was more hands on with OS9 than 10 so this has me stumped

Cheers Nic
 
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I am having a similar problem with an old "User" folder.

The user was the previous owner of the computer, and I figured he had deleted all his stuff before turning it over to me. I took a look at the folder a while back, but it was entirely empty so I didn't pay any further attention to it.


Lately I've been running out of HD space and keep having to delete files to give myself more leeway, so while searching for dispensable files to delete I came across the folder again and took another look.

The folder contains three entirely empty sub-folders titled: Desktop, documents, and library. When I use the Get Info feature, however, it says that it is taking up over 30GB of space!

The folder is still in the Users directory, but the user doesn't show up as an account in System Preferences.


I would like to know if there is any way to deal with this. I considered just putting the folder in the trash, but wasn't sure if this could mess with the computer's functioning in any way as the user was the previous admin. Additionally, when I tried copying and pasting the folder into another area a box popped up to inform me that it was preparing to copy x number of files (the number kept increasing until I hit cancel), so it appears that something is indeed in there.

Does anyone know of a way to see any hidden files in the folder, or know if I can safely delete the folder outright without potentially causing future problems?

Appreciate any assistance people can provide.
 
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Yeah the same thing happened to me. was bugging me for ages and ended up losing access to finder whilst trying to fix :p

Anyway i did the same and copied the folder to another location and got a glimpse of the name of the file. After i used a program called "Find Any File" available free on the apple downloads page, and typed the name of file in there, and there was an option to display the hidden files.

Right click the file and reveal in finder should show you the contents of the folder which you can safely delete i suppose depending on what it is.

With mine there was only the one file but it was 7 gig big. If it is a number of different files you have i think you may be able to choose a folder name instead of file name which might be easier; worth checking out though with 30gib.
 

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