Use SD to restore HD and gain space?

[altwegg]

Hi:

Evaluating SD and love it. But have a question that someone might be able to answer. When I run SD, it evaluated 699,923 files, but only copied 544,731 files. When I get info on the MacBook Pro disk, it shows 104,142,577,664 bytes used, but the backup only shows 96,615,665,664 bytes used.

If I reboot on the external drive (the SD backup) and then use SD to "backup" the backup to the main drive, will I end up more free space on my drive? It appears that the backup is almost 8 gigs smaller than the boot drive. Sure would be nice to get that back. Or would a backup/restore enhance the performance of the computer's boot drive?

thanks!

Chris

(I can send the log file from the backup if that helps.)

[dnanian]

Well, you either have a bunch of temporary files (restart should clear them up), or you have a folder in /Volumes that shouldn't be there and has data in it (use Finder's "Go To Folder" command to open the hidden /Volumes folder, and look for a folder -- NOT an alias -- named after something that's not a connected drive).

[altwegg]

Thanks! It was a folder in /Volumes that I deleted and did another backup. Came much closer to matching the original. (I understand that there's a bunch of stuff that SuperDuper ignores as unneeded.)

Thanks for response!

Chris

[sdsl]

For newer laptops, there is a safe sleep mode that writes the entire contents of RAM to a file called sleepimage that is located in /private/var/vm. My laptop has 3 GB RAM so this file is 3 GB in size. This file, like the swap files in the same directory, doesn't seem to be copied by SuperDuper (copying them would serve no purpose).

In my case, the swap files had grown to take up about 1 GB and with the 3 GB sleepfile, I saw a ~ 4 GB difference between the clone and the original drive artificially caused by these temporary files that would serve no purpose had they been copied.