I was trying to copy all of my data from my 750 GB hard drive over to a 1 TB external drive and it told me there was insufficient space. Can someone help me figure out what's going on so I can finish editing my videos, please?
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
April,
was your external drive empty when you began copying data to it from your internal drive? Does your external drive have more than one partition?
The hard drive, which is a Seagate Backup Plus had just been reformatted. I set it to exFAT and erased everything on it because it was my understanding that that was what would allow it to be used on Mac and PC. So, the only thing that was on the drive before I started copying was an empty folder I had created to put the files in.
Thank you for your response.
April,
if you click on your external drive’s icon in the Finder sidebar, and press ⌘i to Get Info on it, what does it say are your external disk’s total capacity and currently unused space, according to ▼ General: Capacity and Available?
It had said that it had the 1 TB capacity, or whatever number is slightly under that since none of the drives hold exactly up to what they're listed. The 950 GB was just too much for it since I had loaded about 100 GB on it before attempting that folder.
I think I might have found the problem though. In my Movies folder, I have a Final Cut Library file called "Macintosh HD's projects and events." It is 451.91 GB. Then above it, I have a folder called "Macintosh HD's Old Final Cut Projects and Events." It is 495.9 GB. So, I am currently copying over that folder to my external drive. Then I am going to erase it from my internal hard drive and see if that does the trick. Unless you see that being a terrible idea. It's where the problem seems to be stemming from. The only thing that I'm curious about is how are they both allowed to exist on my internal hard drive?
April,
I haven’t run Final Cut Pro myself, so I’m not familiar with which files it creates; but one possibility is that both of these folders contain one or more files which are actually “hard links” (a way of allowing a single file to be referenced by different names in different places on the filesystem), and that the size counting mechanism is effectively counting the same file(s) twice.
The hard drive in my computer holds 750 GB, however the movies folder shows that it is holding over 950 GB. How is this so?
