Data occupying double amount of disk space!

Hello everybody.

Right now I am in the middle of the process of backing up the User information stored on an old iMac G5: I plugged the 250GB drive into my PowerMac which recognized it right away, and after assigning the ownership of the files to my user and attaching an external 750GB drive (formatted as HFS+ case sensitive), started copying the user directory of one of the users of the aforementioned Imac. I decided to leave the machine alone overnight to copy the heaviest directory (~190GB).

Today I arrived to the office and noticed the copy process had finished, but also noticed that in the external hard drive the copied files were about 380GB! Why did that happen? Did the machine somehow copied them twice (how?)?

For one thing I prefer to use the terminal, and am pretty sure "du -sh" gave me the data sizes, plus I kept monitoring the process. And more importantly, I don't imagine how a 250GB drive could store 380GB of a single user.

Could someone please explain this to me and perhaps give advice about how to recover the "original" file sizes?

Thanks,
Joe.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I checked the directories and found that under [User-name]/Library/Favorites/ there was a link to the heaviest subdirectory, which for some reason prompted the system to copy the enclosed data twice almost doubling the size of the entire directory.

Joe.