copied User folder is half the size of the original

[masteroflondon]

I must be missing something here.

I copied a User folder to an external drive, newly formatted HFS+, and when the copy is complete it is slightly under half the size (32.45GB) of the original (74.15GB). The number of files in both is 39,651. They look the same if I visually scan over them.

How can this be? I ran a diff command in terminal, and this only reported a few minor differences that are likely due to ongoing changes to the original, which is for the logged in account.

Teminal du commands also show similar respective sizes and differences.

I recopied the folder, got the exact same result.

This is Snow Leopard 10.6.1.

Any thoughts? Am I going to kick myself?
Thanks

 

[masteroflondon]

update!

In terminal I ran this copy command:
cp -pR /Users/[name] "/Volumes/diskname/"

That made a copy that has the exact same size and file count as the original.

Does this help explain?
R recurses, nothing special looking there.
p maintains attributes, which doesn't explain the difference to me!

Thanks again!