Drive filling up over time. Why?

[jreffner 0]

Ok, my primary internal SCSI drive appeared to getting to full. I bought a larger internal SCSI drive and then noticed that my external firewire drive (used to duplicate the internal SCSI drive with Retrospect) was much smaller. We are talking about 30 GB difference here. Anyway, I installed the new larger SCSI drive and duplicated the FireWire drive back to the new larger SCSI drive. Guess what? The space used was about the same again.

 

Then, I've noticed the FW drive staying about the same size while the new larger SCSI is getting fuller just like the older SCSI drive did. retrospect is set to duplicate all files except for cache files. i'm using OS 10.2.6. Can anyone please tell me why my internal SCSI drive grows daily, but my external FireWire drive (the duplicte) does not?

 

Many thanks,

Jim

jreffner@fuse.net

[shadowspawn 0]

Quote:

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retrospect is set to duplicate all files except for cache files. i'm using OS 10.2.6. Can anyone please tell me why my internal SCSI drive grows daily, but my external FireWire drive (the duplicte) does not?

 

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You have identified a difference, the cache files. How big are they? One way of checking with Retrospect is to use Check Selector while editing the selector. You could edit "All Files" and see how much is selected from the original drive, then edit "All Files Except Cache Files" and compare the total size.

 

Otherwise the obvious thing to do is compare your two drives. Unfortunately, I am not sure of an easy way of doing this! (Using Terminal to do a diff on the output of du for each drive will find the differences, but will be somewhat tedious to interpret!)

 

Another difference between the drives is likely to be that the original has the Virtual Memory backing store on it (assuming it is the boot volume). You can get some idea of how large it is by running "top" in the Terminal, and looking at the VM line. I don't know the details of how this matches disk used, but you can at least compare your "grows daily" with the size in case they match.

[CallMeDave 7]

>>Another difference between the drives...

 

Might want to be sure both drives are formatted as HFS+ volumes...

 

Dave