Where Did all the GBs go? Phantom Gigs!

[spitboy2000]

I used SD to copy my 250gig hard drive, which announced that it had 220gigs of stuff on it. But the new copy only has 150gigs on it. And then i used OmniDiskSweeper and it too, decided that the hard drive has only 150gigs on it. Any thoughts on what could be happening and how I find out what's going on?

Thanks!

G

[dnanian]

Check your /Volumes folder with Finder's "Go To Folder" command. Any folders in there (not links or aliases)?

[spitboy2000]

i seem to have a folder that is called "Backup" in it. Unfortunately after deleting it i have only found 1.5gigs of the 70some gigs that are phantom...

[dnanian]

Check with Get Info to see how big it is -- that might be where your space is...

[spitboy2000]

the Get Info on /Volumes is showing a grayed out "Calculating Size" for last 5 minutes....

should i have 66gb in /Library ?

[dnanian]

Well, I wouldn't Get Info on Volumes, but rather that backup folder. 66GB in /Library seems excessive...

[spitboy2000]

only 20kb in volumes folder

However i think i may have found the culprit -- /Library shows 66GB in terminal, but only 7GB shows up elsewhere. any thoughts on what to do now?

[dnanian]

Have you tried repairing the drive with Disk Utility?

[spitboy2000]

will do

here's the last twenty or so offending folders -- what i got thru terminal on what's in the library

205696 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Caches/com.stuffonfire.tickr
298644 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Mail/Mailboxes
336808 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Mail/HTTPMail-spitboy2000@hotmail.com
385216 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Caches/Xtorrent
439504 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Mail/POP-garyrosen@pop.sbcglobal.yahoo.com/INBOX.mbox/Messages
562928 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Mail/POP-garyrosen@pop.sbcglobal.yahoo.com/INBOX.mbox
714304 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/fz5ags7u.default/browserstate-logs
759296 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Firefox/Profiles
759296 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/fz5ags7u.default
759312 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Firefox
775640 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Mail/POP-
1155936 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Caches
1663940 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Google/Google Desktop
1663940 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Google/Google Desktop/Index
1663940 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Google/Google Desktop/Index/0893CE08-0C5B-11D8-B0EE95A8DCC8.trindex
1664080 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support/Google
1860892 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Mail
2750828 /Users/garyandrew/Library//Application Support
6071056 /Users/garyandrew/Library/

any info here?

ill do disk utility next

does it make any sense to copy the clone's library back to the source's library, since the clone's library doesn't seem to show such a massive GB usage?

[dnanian]

Not really, at least not without understanding the problem. Might be Google Desktop...

[guydavies]

Hi,

I noticed the same thing so I did some investigation. I found that /cores contained a vast number of very large files. I was happy that none of them would be required by the developers of the relevant applications because they were all pretty old so I deleted them. That saved me many Gigabytes that SD need now not evaluate and (presumably) decide not to backup.

Rgds,

Guy