hard drivemacos
I have a TM back up from a retired drive. The folder info screen looks like this.
The drive is 3TB and there's still 900GB free, so the 4.75TB reported size is not correct. Is there a simple way to find out how big this folder actually is? I need to archive it someplace and want to know how much space it actually takes up.
When you select the SuperDuper script / copy mode, you can change the scripts, that SuperDuper will run during the copy process.
As you can see, a couple of files are omitted:
So the temporary and cache files, etc. may have taken quite some space on your old disk. Some other possible reasons could be:
When the OS is low on memory it creates a file called a swap file, aka virtual memory on your hard drive, and in OS X this starts at some amount (I think 64 MB) then double as needed. So if you have 8 GB of RAM, you could end up with an 8 GB swap file. This is then deleted when you reboot.
You can read about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging
Where the files are located and how to disable it: http://osxdaily.com/2010/10/08/mac-virtual-memory-swap/
Best Answer
I prefer to get size information from the command line, especially when I have an administrator account on the computer and I'm logged in with that user.
Open a terminal (either cmd-spacebar/Spotlight and then type "terminal" or through Applications->Utilities).
Type: sudo du -sh /Volumes/Feynman 3.0 and hit enter
You will be prompted for your admin password, and then du will calculate the size of the folders/files on the disk.
You can also then add to the path (or add "/*" on the end of "/Volumes/Feynman 3.0") to get the sizes of the subfolders to aid in further troubleshooting.