500GB missing space on external drive?!

[discofuel]

I'm helping a friend organize their computer and a 2TB External G Drive with a lot of video footage files.

In Disk Utility the G Drive reports 1.08TB of data but the folder containing all the files is only around 500GB, almost exactly half that, so there is 500GB of missing space.

"About this Mac" reports there is 470GB of "Other" files.

I used Disk Inventory X to inspect the contents of the drive. There are no hidden files and nothing equating to anything like that much space in the hidden folders, trashes etc

My friend doesn't remember what files she had on the drive so we can't check whether everything is there.

Could this be missing/damaged files? How can I find out what this is?

 

[ConCat]

Try this command on the command-line:

sudo du -h -d 1 /Volumes/disk_name

Type your password at the prompt to give it permission to check folders it can't normally access. It'll tally everything up on the drive and show you how large each folder is. You can replace "-d 1" with however detailed you want the results.

If this returns the same amount of used space, you probably have disk corruption. I'd run a disk repair in Disk Utility ASAP.

 

[discofuel]

Ah interesting, thanks for the tip. It is reporting the missing 506GB in the .Trashes directory.

All the applications I used - OmniDiskSweeper, Disk Inventory X etc, and Finder when I enabled viewing hidden files reported the size of this folder as 0kb.

So is this just trashed items that haven't been properly erased or could it be missing files? How best to proceed?

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I should add that it's reporting the overall the size as 1004GB and I have repaired the drive with Disk Utility several times previously

 

[ConCat]

That folder should be empty. Run this command (double check you typed it right though, it's a dangerous one):

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/disk_name/.Trashes/*

 

[discofuel]

I've actually copied all files to a second G-Drive so if it's safe to delete all the contents of that folder I'll probably just format the drive and start again.

Thanks for your help

 

[ConCat]

I've actually copied all files to a second G-Drive so if it's safe to delete all the contents of that folder I'll probably just format the drive and start again.

Thanks for your help

Ah, that works too! You're welcome.