Backup crashed - some GB on HD are still occupied - but where

[dnanian]

Hi, Larry. What happened here is that your FireWire drive suddenly disconnected during the backup, and dropped completely off the bus: something we've seen a few times, but not often.

When this occurs, we retry the copy, but instead of failing it copies directly into the special "mount point" that OSX creates, which instead of going to the firewire drive goes to the main hard drive instead.

Disconnect the FireWire drive and look in the special /Volumes directory on your boot drive. In there, you'll see a folder with the same name as the external hard drive. In there you'll find the files from the backup: drag the whole folder to the trash and empty it, and you should be all set.

However, there remains a problem with your hard drive: this kind of things shouldn't happen, and indicates severe issues with the drive. I'd contact the drive manufacturer to see if there are any firmware updates available, and apply whatever they've made available...

Hope that helps!