External Drive help - Mac

[Ritalin]

Here's the problem: I have 2 LaCie D2 drives that I use for back up, and they're synched. (I use to Synch Pro and it works really well).

But drive 1 shows that I have around 5 GB of drive space left, and drive 2 shows that I have around 145 GB of drive space left. I thought initially that I might have dragged a large folder inside another and that was taking up this extra 100+ GB of memory, but I went through every folder on drive 1 and that's not the case.

Could it be that I trashed a lot of folders on drive 1 and didn't wait for the drive to stop erasing them when I emptied the trash and impatiently unplugged the drive before it ejected? That sounds like something I might do.

Could there be hidden folders or files on the drive? If so, how can I see them?

I'd like to recover this disk space if I could, because I don't really want to have to go out and buy two more drives just yet.

Thanks in advance.

[ToiletCrusher]

I ran into that problem using my external hard drive with that "time capsule" feature in Loepard.

It kept making a backup of my mac almost weekly.

Quickly, I went from having 1TB of storage to under 500gb.

I had to change the settings because I didn't know it would start the backup process without my permission.

Hidden folders - not really a problem. Mac shows them all.

Dependent of the speed of the drive, deletion should be relatively quick. However, when you open a finder window for the external drive, look in the lower right hand corner for a "trash" specific for your external drive.

This would be similar to how in iMovie, when you delete a segment of a video, you have to clean out the iMovie trash in the lower right hand corner.

Hope this helps a bit.

[boosterp]

I ran into that problem using my external hard drive with that "time capsule" feature in Loepard.

It kept making a backup of my mac almost weekly.

Quickly, I went from having 1TB of storage to under 500gb.

I had to change the settings because I didn't know it would start the backup process without my permission.

Hidden folders - not really a problem. Mac shows them all.

Dependent of the speed of the drive, deletion should be relatively quick. However, when you open a finder window for the external drive, look in the lower right hand corner for a "trash" specific for your external drive.

This would be similar to how in iMovie, when you delete a segment of a video, you have to clean out the iMovie trash in the lower right hand corner.

Hope this helps a bit.

Exactly, Time Capsule has created a monster file on one of your drives and you need to go back and change the settings. I think you can go "incremental" instead of a full back up and it will save you disk space as well.

[instrument]

Or don't use time capsule at all and just run them as a raid?

Also sounds like one of em might just have what time machine calls the latest back up while the other has all the old ones as well.

This should be fairly obvious by looking at the file structure though

[KnoxHarrington]

I'd exclude the Applications, Library, and System files from the Time Machine backup. Just have it back up /Users.

I've heard of Time Machine continuing to send massive backups when you're using a VM program like Parallels or VMWare Fusion. Exclude the VM file from Time Machine as well.

[Ritalin]

These are all helpful answers, but I'm not using Time Machine. I use these hard drives to back up my digital photo files - I'm a photographer.

So everything I put on these drives I drag and drop.

Here's something I didn't think of before: does it matter if I've done work straight off the hard drive before? I mean, I had an entire digital photo session backed up to this hard drive, then I just loaded that session into the software I was using to process the RAWs.

[KnoxHarrington]

These are all helpful answers, but I'm not using Time Machine. I use these hard drives to back up my digital photo files - I'm a photographer.

So everything I put on these drives I drag and drop.

Here's something I didn't think of before: does it matter if I've done work straight off the hard drive before? I mean, I had an entire digital photo session backed up to this hard drive, then I just loaded that session into the software I was using to process the RAWs.

No, that shouldn't matter. The only drawback is the much reduced transfer time of USB or Firewire as opposed to SATA.

(which reminds me: get off your ass and start putting eSATA ports on your shit, Apple.)