My Clone drive is identical excpet it's free space..?

[chaos86]

I have a Powerbook with a 60gb hard drive, formatted capacity 55.77gb. I have an external firewire drive of 200gb, partitioned into 55.77gb and whatever is left over. Once a week I clone (using carbon copy cloner) my powerbook's drive onto the external drive's equivalent sized partition. It boots, and it has everything I put on it with no exceptions.

The weird thing is that on my powerbooks hard drive, depending on the day, I have 5-10 gb of free space, but the clone drive always has 25gb of free space. Weird huh?

Any ideas? Is this a mistake on the part of the drive or the computer, or is my powerbook's drive missing 20gb that I could somehow reclaim?

 

[ITASOR]

It's because the internal drive is the one you're using for long periods of time, and the virtual memory file size builds up (can be anywhere from 2-10GB...maybe more). On the external, when you're not booting off of it, there's NO virtual memory taking up space, and when you boot from it quickly, you're not doing anything intensive to create a need for very much virtual memory.

To check the size of the VM, open activity monitor and look under the "System Memory" tab at "VM Size". Mine is 3.33GB right now.

 

[chaos86]

It's because the internal drive is the one you're using for long periods of time, and the virtual memory file size builds up (can be anywhere from 2-10GB...maybe more). On the external, when you're not booting off of it, there's NO virtual memory taking up space, and when you boot from it quickly, you're not doing anything intensive to create a need for very much virtual memory.

To check the size of the VM, open activity monitor and look under the "System Memory" tab at "VM Size". Mine is 3.33GB right now.

I didn't think that used VM was included in used drive space in the activity moniter or get info windows. Even if it does, that still doesn't explain the huge difference. Right now I have 49 used, 7 free on the internal, and 30 used and 26 free. Thats 19 gigs that are dissappearing when cloned, and at present I have only 6 gigs in VM. My CCC settings have no exceptions, just straight clone. I don't get it. I'm always having to move files around when leaving for the weekend because I can't fit everything in 60 gigs (my itunes library is 15, without the movies). I want my 19 gigs back!

 

[ITASOR]

Partitioning isn't my area of knowledge, but...if your internal drive is 60GB giving you 55.77 because of the bytes-->GB conversion of whatever, then shouldn't you also partition the external HD to 60GB which would leave 55.77GB?

If you get info on your partition, is the full 60GB available?

 

[chaos86]

Partitioning isn't my area of knowledge, but...if your internal drive is 60GB giving you 55.77 because of the bytes-->GB conversion of whatever, then shouldn't you also partition the external HD to 60GB which would leave 55.77GB?

If you get info on your partition, is the full 60GB available?

Get Info>Capacity on both the internal powerbook hard drive and the external hard drive's smaller partition is exactly 55.77gb.

Even if the bytes>GB conversion lost me 5gb and the VM is using 6gb, theres still 10gb unaccounted for. sigh, I miss my gigabytes.

 

[stoid]

Systematically check how big the different folders are. Get Info on the original and clone and see if the System, User, Applications, etc. folders are the same size on each.

If you find a discrepancy, go to subfolders until you isolate the issue.

 

[chaos86]

Interestingly Disk Inventory X shows in the volume window the same info that the finder shows
internal 55 capacity, 49 used, 6 free
ext/part 55 capacity, 30 used 25 free
but the examination window says
internal 55 capacity, 30 used, 25 free
ext/part 55 capacity, 30 used, 25 free

this is getting weird

Systematically check how big the different folders are. Get Info on the original and clone and see if the System, User, Applications, etc. folders are the same size on each.

If you find a discrepancy, go to subfolders until you isolate the issue.

will do... this may take a while

"Calculating Size"

The only difference in sizes amongst root level folders is that Private on the original is about 900mb bigger (1.08gb vs 167mb), but that could be a change since booting and that still doesnt account for 19 gigs.

i dont wanna reformat but it looks like i might have to.