My external hard drive has no files but says it's nearly full

[wildrosenbergs]

I have a Toshiba 750GB USB external hard drive. I have a 320 GB internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro which I purchased in September 2011.

I used it for Time Machine but for some reason Time Machine ceased to function, taking weeks instead of hours to back up.

So I cleared all the files and have been backing up manually, i.e. once a week deleting the files and then saving all my files again. Everything is in one folder so easy to do, takes about 2 hours for about 180GB.

Then suddenly, my external hard drive says that it has only 68 GB free, although there are no files on it. I used Disk Utility to erase free space, but didn't get any more free space.

Can anyone clue me in? Do I have some sort of partition on the hard drive? I would like to restore it to being utterly blank.

[Gav2k]

Originally Posted by wildrosenbergs

I have a Toshiba 750GB USB external hard drive. I have a 320 GB internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro which I purchased in September 2011.

I used it for Time Machine but for some reason Time Machine ceased to function, taking weeks instead of hours to back up.

So I cleared all the files and have been backing up manually, i.e. once a week deleting the files and then saving all my files again. Everything is in one folder so easy to do, takes about 2 hours for about 180GB.

Then suddenly, my external hard drive says that it has only 68 GB free, although there are no files on it. I used Disk Utility to erase free space, but didn't get any more free space.

Can anyone clue me in? Do I have some sort of partition on the hard drive? I would like to restore it to being utterly blank.

Empty the trash with the drive connected

[wildrosenbergs]

Gav2k, thanks for the quick fix. I'm glad I posted not just to fix my own hard drive, but surely this is a very common problem.

[32samc]

My macbook's harddrive crashed 3 days ago. This is the second harddrive to be replaced. the last one was 500GB the new one is 320Gb. I have an Iomega external harddrive that I bought in 2011 when it crashed the first time and have been using it ever since doing backups with time machine.

I plug in the external harddrive and open up time machine backups and all I see is old-ish files from 2011 where are my most recent files? I cant see them. The external HDD info tells me I have 160Gb of memory left so I want to know where the heck 335Gb worth of work is on the external HDD?

I have my final year dissertation due on Monday and I need to find certain files that i just cant see. Any help would be gratefully appreciated.