odd space mismatch
 

Even following a SD! cloning (smart update), I'm encountering a strange mismatch between "space used" on my source disk and "space used" on my external back-up. 133GB on the source, 129GB on the external... Yet when I compare the root folders on both, they are equal in size. What am I missing in this picture?? Thanks.

That's not really terribly odd. As indicated in the "What's going to happen?" section, various temporary files, certain caches, etc aren't copied.

Thanks so much for the prompt reply. I've been using SD! for years and I'd never seen such a huge discrepancy, but I won't worry then. Now my mission is to try and uncover the huge temp file clogging my computer!?

Well, just the sleepimage file (for laptops) can be as large as you have memory...

I am also encountering a rather large discrepancy between the harddrive of my PowerBook and the just performed backup to my new partitioned external 'One Technologies' HD.

The Finder Info window reveals 46.07 GB of 111.67 GB used on the internal PB HD and 33.75 GB of 149.88 GB used on the particular partition of the external HD.

That is a discrepancy of more than 12 GB!

I used the 'backup all files' sript and the "Erase ... then copy files from ..." option.

I was just about to repartition my internal drive and then rebackup from the external drive to the internal one in order to defrag the drive and increase the (lately) slowish PowerBook performance and now feel somewhat reluctant to do so...

Any ideas?

Regards
Jo*

Use Finder's "Go To Folder" command to open

/Volumes

See any folders (not links/aliases) in there?

There are 4 aliases in there:

MacIntosh HD (4kb) and the 3 partitions of the external drive (each 0 kb).

Btw, I did a smart-update from the MacIntosh HD to the backup-partition of the ext. HD again using the 'backup all files' sript and now the size of the ext. HD partition used for the backup is 42.18 GB of 149.88 GB instead of 33.75 GB (after the initial backup using the 'backup all files' sript and the "Erase ... then copy files from ..." option). The only other change I made was the 'successful-completion" setting: Instead of 'Do nothing' I now chose 'Set BackUp as startup-disk'.

That reduces the discrepancy between the internal HD and the backup-partition of the ext. HD down to roughly 4 GB.

What happened...?

Is it now save to rebackup from the ext. HD to the internal HD?

Jo*

Edit: I checked the file-sizes with WhatSize and - dahdah - the private/var folder contains 4.09 GB of which there are 3 GB in 'vm', another 1.07 GB in 'tmp', 11.1 MB in 'log', 6.99 MB in 'db', etc.. Are these all temporary files which I won't need for rebackingup?

Ah, you have a very large swapfile. Yes, those would account for a significant difference.