[Pat McCrotch]

So I'm using a 250GB external hard drive with superduper! to create backups. I'm keeping 3 copies and progressively erasing the oldest one to make space for the newer backup copy.

The problem is, my hard drive isn't freeing up space when I erase the previous backup. Let's say I have 100GB available and my backups are 40GB each. I erase the last copy and create a new backup; I should now be at about 100GB again except that when I get the info on my external HD, I'm told that I only have 60GB available as if my old backup copy didn't get erased.

In the past I've remedied this by formatting the drive, but I don't want to have to do that because I obviously don't want to trash all my backups. My HD is formatted in HFS+ with journaling enabled (so that my backup copies can be bootable). Any ideas?

 

[CubaMark]

Empty the trash!


M

 

[Pat McCrotch]

How? When I delete something from my HD, doesn't it just get canned? Didn't know there was a trash can associated with my external drive...

 

[HowEver]

Umm, try it? It's the same trash, visually. Have a finder window open with the external drive in view, and you'll see it drop 40GB.

 

[John Clay]

When you move an item to the Trash, it isn't deleted immediately - it remains there until you empty the Trash. This applies to all drives, internal and external, with the exclusion of network drives.

 

[monokitty]

Wow.

 

[Deep Blue]

Wow.

I don't get it

 

[MacDoc]

You would be better to just partition the external into 3 and roll through them in order using erase in Superduper on the oldest.
SD remembers which drive you backed up to last so you just go to the next one. ) call them One Two and Three.
I do that with two partitions Odd/Even and then have a third backup once a month that is away from the computer on a dedicated drive.

 

[eMacMan]

You would be better to just partition the external into 3 and roll through them in order using erase in Superduper on the oldest.
SD remembers which drive you backed up to last so you just go to the next one. ) call them One Two and Three.
I do that with two partitions Odd/Even and then have a third backup once a month that is away from the computer on a dedicated drive.

Similar to my system except I have kept my OS slim enough to do compressed disk images instead of clones. Course I don't have Garage band or iDVD installed but I am keeping my system down to 5.5GB.