Maxtor and Leopard issues

[brobson]

Bought the Maxtor onetouch specifically to use with time machine whenever I got around to buying leopard. Now I have leopard and it asked if I wanted to automatically back up. I said yes. It seems to have duplicated my whole system a couple of times. Now I only have 15GB available. I tried to go through manually and see if there were duplicate folders that I could throw away but its a mess because for some reason my Get Info won't tell me the calculated size of the folders so I don't know if they're identical or not and don't want to risk throwing the wrong one away.
Silly I know. Does anyone know of software I could download that would show duplicate folders so I can be sure of which ones to throw away?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Are you backing up using Leopard's Time Machine or Maxtor's OneTouch software?

 

[brobson]

I guess both. I guess that's part of the problem

 

[old-wiz]

Using two different backup techniques on one hard drive partition is asking for trouble. You can't simply go into the time machine backups and delete stuff. I would suggest wiping the drive and just using time machine and not using the maxtor stuff.

 

[brobson]

Please forgive my stupidity but where do we put all our stuff while wiping it clean? it exceeds my imac's capacity?

 

[BlueRevolution]

All that should be on there is a backup copy of your system (or two backups, possibly). You already have copies of all of those files, so you don't need to back up your backup.

I concur with old-wiz. To erase the contents of the drive, go to /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, select the drive in the left-hand column, then click the Erase tab.

 

[brobson]

Thanks but thats not really a solution for me as there is a lot more on the backup drive than on my computer. My computer holds 1G memory and the backup drive has 438 G of stuff on it (x3 I think) and it's capacity is 698 GB which is used up and now won't accept anymore stuff.

Like I said I think a software that would identify duplicates would work. Throw away 2/3s of it, store the stuff, then wipe clean and start with time machine.
But I don't know where to put the files that won't fit.
My son has a mac mini he's not using but I don't think it'll hold all of that either.

 

[brobson]

I downloaded Araxis. I hope that's a good one. If anyone has experience with it please let me know.
I messed up years ago using Mac Sweep.
I will keep you posted.
Thanks,
Brenda

 

[old-wiz]

the 1gig of memory is main memory, NOT the disk; it has no relation to the size of any backup. The backup depends on he size of the hard disk, not how much memory you have.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Since you have two backups on the external drive, it makes sense that there will be several times as much data on the backup as on the original since everything is maintained in at least two places on the backup drive.

Don't try to compare folders, clean things up, whatever. Simply erase the drive and start over. You will not lose anything important. That's the purpose of a backup drive.