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-   -   large discrepancy between internal and backup drives (https://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2927)

ncmphoto 09-26-2007 07:28 AM

large discrepancy between internal and backup drives
 
Friend of mine has a peculiar issue after doing a backup with SuperDuper. His internal HD has 6Gb of used space more than his external backup drive/clone.

As he described, what happened is that he launched SuperDuper and set it to Smart backup to the external FireWire drive. SuperDuper seemed to hang after a while. He stopped the backup and/or quit the app (not sure which). Then he relaunched it and it completed the backup successfully. But then he found that his internal drive had 6Gb more used space on it than the clone. He looked via the Finder but could not identify what was taking up all the disk space. I know that clones are a bit smaller than the original drives since SD doesn't back up some cache files etc. but a 6 GB difference isn't normal.

I've heard that SD will do the backup to the internal hd if it can't find the correct external backup drive. Dunno if this happened and if so, what that file would be called and how to delete it. I also don't know if it's possible for SD to lose the connection to the external backup drive during a backup. But somehow SD is involved since that was what was running when the issue appeared.

Sorry I don't have more precise info as this person is leaving tomorrow for a trip abroad (and possibly no Internet connection) so he asked me for advice and I thought to come here.

His Mac is a 12" al PowerBook G4 running OSX 10.4.10 on a 40Gb internal hd. Before the incident he said he had 15Gb free space on the drive. Not sure how much RAM is installed.

I hope this is enough info to start troubleshooting the issue.

thanks for all suggestions and assistance,

cheers,

ncm

dnanian 09-26-2007 08:36 AM

SD! will not back up to the internal if it can't find the external: there are situations where if the external fails during the copy we'll end up copying to a directory in /Volumes. He can use Finder's "Go To Folder" command to look.

But -- 6GB isn't necessarily an unreasonable amount of difference, especially if he hasn't restarted his Mac for a while... VM Swap files, sleep images, temporary files, spotlight index -- all can be quite large.

ncmphoto 09-26-2007 03:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dnanian (Post 14318)
SD! will not back up to the internal if it can't find the external: there are situations where if the external fails during the copy we'll end up copying to a directory in /Volumes. He can use Finder's "Go To Folder" command to look.

But -- 6GB isn't necessarily an unreasonable amount of difference, especially if he hasn't restarted his Mac for a while... VM Swap files, sleep images, temporary files, spotlight index -- all can be quite large.

I don't know if he's restarted recently or not, but will advise doing so. He has been using SD for at least a year and this is the first time he has had such a large discrepancy. He deals mostly with text files in his work, which are small. I don't know if that would produce large cache, swap, temp etc files or not.

Thanks for the tip about looking in the /Volumes. Since it seems that indeed his external seems to have failed or somehow got disconnected during a backup this might be the issue.

dnanian 09-26-2007 04:19 PM

Glad to help (hopefully).


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