Copied Files To HDD - 'Get Info' File Sizes are different?

Question

Copied Files To HDD - 'Get Info' File Sizes are different?

Hi All ---

-- not sure how to put it any other way.....maybe this is a normal thing?

I've copied 161.78Gigs of data from the P.B. to Lacie HDD but 'Get Info' on target disk is only reading 161.61Gigs - all files seem to be in place, seem to be copied, working etc --- but thats about 17megs of info missing somewhere?

Uh, what gives?

should i trash, and re-do the whole lot again? hmm.

thnx for any help in Adv ----

John W.

PB 15/1.25 ghz/SD/80gig/768 RAM/, Mac OS X (10.3.9), Powermac G3

Posted on Sep 8, 2007 3:57 AM

Reply

Answer 1

joeuu

Level 5

5,089 points

Sep 8, 2007 10:06 AM in response to John Williams24

Possibly compare the checksum of each, see if they are in fact different.

http://www.kingdom-era.com/products/validator/

Joe

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 9, 2007 3:13 AM in response to joeuu

Hi Joe ---

Thanks for that - have been offline since yest. -- seems the main P.B. drive decided to go AWOL on me - but just overnight though? No clue whats going on there -- have repaired disk, permissions, run onyx, etc..... just didnt want to boot, occasionally would boot from Ext. HDD - Drive Icon vanished, all sorts of nonsense.... and then returned this a.m. as if nothing had ever happened.
I reckon HD is on its way out.... hmm.

I'm now getting lots of beachballs. v. boring. Everything is backed up externally TWICE now (& cloned Drive TWICE??) - onto two separate drives - am just going to erase, reformat P.B. before reinstalling 10.3 & 10.3.9 -- off to see a Doctor/Repairman tomorrow.

thanks for the link -- will def. have a go with that in the future.

Cheers,

J.

Reply

Answer 3

louie

Level 4

2,950 points

Sep 9, 2007 12:02 PM in response to John Williams24

You can't really go by the total size of all files from one drive to another. I understand the sector sizes on different hard drives of different sizes will be different, and you are limited to minimum sector size quanta for your data. The way it was explained to me was like this - (pulling fake numbers out of the air) - imagine your file is 3Kbytes, and the HD sectors are 1KB. You use exactly 3 sectors. If the other, larger HD has 2KB sectors, you need 2 sectors (4K worth), but are really using 3/4 of them for your file. The system reports using 4K for that file, but the file size is exactly the same. Or something like that, I could have it wrong, but I have observed this behavior over the years.

Check the exact file size of several different files using Get Info (exact size in bytes). These should match.

Reply

Answer 4

Sep 18, 2007 1:46 PM in response to louie

Hey Louie ---

Thanks for that -- I've since had the machine go in for repair - all went well for the HDD Backups made two complete clones on separate drives...

unfortunately, the repair has opened up another can of worms all together... hmm.

thanks for the reply --

J.

Reply