Seemingly identical hard drives and content, one is missing 20Gb

T

tbm

Messages
459
Name
Mike
Edit My Images
Yes
I currently use two 750Gb WD external drives for my photo storage; one as a primary and the other as a backup.

The images are backed up manually (drag and drop) every week or so, and I always replace, rather than update folders to avoid the backup version keeping files I've since deleted.

Both drives show a capacity of 698Gb, although despite having practically identical content on each the backup shows less than 9Gb free whilst the primary shows 29Gb.

The properties of the folders on each drive show around 663Gb used on each drive, so where has the additional 20Gb gone on my backup drive?

I can't see any partitions etc on the drive.. I would try re-formatting it but this would obviously leave me without a backup for a while..
 
Could it be deleted filed that have not been 'deleted'.

Have you tried emptying the recycle bin?
 
Hmm
Not to sure on this-but may be worth checking System Restore..
Windows reserves part of the drive for SR purposes-Not sure if it would be using one of the externals though?
 
Thanks guys :)

Having downloaded and run the tidy piece of software linked to by Harvey Nikon (cheers chap ;)) I've found that it is indeed the recycling facilities that are taking up the extra space.

This is somewhat odd as I always empty the recycle bin before file transfer (as I don't often have enough space to get the new stuff on), and the recycle bin is currently showing empty, even though WinDirStat is showing 19.3Gb of stuff in "$RECYCLE.BIN" and 4.9Gb in "RECYCLER".

I also had a look at my primary photography drive and managed to purge 7Gb of Tiffs and CR2s from the "RECYCLER" folder; which also wasn't showing up in the recycle bin in windows explorer and apparently hadn't been modified since the beginning of last year.

I've now deleted the contents of "RECYCLER" on both drives using WinDirStat, and also the entire "$RECYCLE.BIN" folder on my backup. Both drives are now showing around 34Gb of free space - Yay :D

Neil - could you please explain your comment a bit further? Are you referring to the deleted files still being present in the recycle bin, or somewhere else?
I really should sort out some syncing software, although the whole process is further complicated by not being able to run all the drives at once due to power supply limitations. Hopefully when I can afford it I'll stick a 1.5Tb drive in the machine; meaning one less external unit to worry about.

Thanks again for all the help - Happy new year ;)
 
As an aside I've also just found and junked another 10Gb of un-recycled crap on one of my other external drives.. looks like WinDirStat could prove very useful for periodic cleaning of HDs; espcially if they're getting full.

Nice one Mr. Harvey ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top