20gb of data not showing up in in Finder

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Level 1

4 points

20gb of data not showing up in in Finder

Hello,

I have a WD 500GB external My Passport for Mac drive attached to my Mac mini. I now need to use this drive to offload hundreds of photos from my iPhone to clear storage, since my phone isn't backing up anymore. So I want to reformat this drive for use with the phone, and I've cleared or moved everything off of it that showed up in Finder. However, when I go to "Get Info", it shows that there's still a full 20GB or more of some data on the drive, and this data is not showing up in Finder when I look at the drive. I'm afraid to reformat the drive now, in case these are photos or videos or other important files. Any ideas on how I could view that information to make sure I don't need it?

Mac mini, macOS 13.2

Posted on May 6, 2024 2:23 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

148,895 points

May 6, 2024 3:47 PM in response to roel28

Does this 20GB of data still show after you formatted this drive? WD has been know to create an "hidden" partition on these MyPassport drives which cannot be removed ... at least, not easily.

Please provide a screenshot of the Disk Utility when you have this drive selected ... and be sure to have the "Show All Devices" View option selected.

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Answer 2

Tesserax

Level 10

148,895 points

May 7, 2024 5:43 PM in response to roel28

Ok, the Disk Utility does show that this external drive only has a single partition.

One thing you can try is to see if there are any "hidden" files on the drive. macOS has a toggle key combo for this to make it easy. By default, hidden items are, well hidden ... and should remain that why to prevent accidently deleting files that shouldn't be deleted.

The toggle combo is: <shift><command><period>. They do not have to be pressed simultaneously. To return to the "hidden" mode, just use that combination again.

The best way to use this combo is to first hold down the shift key, keep holding it down, and then, hold down the command key ... and while both are being held down, press the period key.

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

148,895 points

May 7, 2024 8:45 PM in response to roel28

Ok, there is nothing shown that I would be concerned about. Looks like you have used this drive for Time Machine backups at some point.

However, if you feel that there may be something critical to you, I suggest that you make a backup of this drive. Otherwise, go ahead a fully erase it.

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