File size EXPLOSION when one HDD icon dragged onto another!

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I've got a 160MB SCSI HDD I need to back up, it has 7.1 on board. I set up a CF card as 8.1 boot drive on the 6x00 BenchMac.

Tied everything together and the 160MB HDD blossomed to 286.7MB when dragged and dropped. WTHeck? 8-o

 

[LaPorta]

I will assume a few things: 1. you are running a pre- OS 8 System (probably the 7.1 on the HD itself), and/or both drives are formatted as HFS, not HFS+. 2. The CF card is a few GB in size (likely 2, since I believe that is the maximum that 7.1 could address - I think) or larger if you are starting up with 8.1 on the CF.

In this scenario, the reason that your stuff ballooned is that the blocks of your much larger CF drive are much, much larger in size than on your HD. Put it this way: the stuff you copied is not actually now made up of more data, but the space that holds it is necessarily bigger. Imagine that you drove a Mini Cooper. The 160 MB drive has parking spaces the size of the Mini, allowing you and other drivers to park tightly together. However, since the CF card has parking spaces the size of a coach bus, AND you can only park one car per space, your Mini now takes up an entire parking spot with a lot of free space left. That free space cannot be used because it is within a physical block.

Though long-winded, here is a good explanation from the Mac Secrets book, 5th edition:

"Earlier in this chapter, we pointed out that files on your disk actually waste space if their sizes don’t exactly fill up the blocks on which they’re stored. Remember, under the Mac’s old Hierarchical File System, every drive, no matter what its size, is divided up into a maximum of 65,536 uniformly-sizedblocks — and therefore, on larger drives, the standard block sizes escalate.

Therefore, the smallest any file can be on any disk is one block. A 9K SimpleText file on a four-gig drive takes up one block — 65K — and wastes 56K! When you multiply that space by the thousands of files on your drive, you can see that you wind up wasting a considerable chunk of disk space."

If this is really bothersome, one way you can get around this is making a 160 MB disk image and dropping the stuff in there, then copy the image to your CF drive. Or, re-format the CF drive as HFS+. That will deal with your ballooning space issue, but the trade-off is the disk won't be able to be read by pre-Mac OS 8 systems.

 

[Cory5412]

This is a big part of, though technically incorrect, why people claim system 7 can't address large disks.

For reference:





I'm curious as to what you meant by "tied together" - did you drag the contents of one disk to another? The difference in size might be eplained by two systems worth of information being on one disk.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Thanks, guys. The parking lot analogy explains all I hope. When I drag the backed up HDD coach bus files over onto a 7.1 formatted SCSI drive they'll fit back into a 160MB partition's Mini files? I only noticed it because I was curious how much free space was on the 160MB SCSI Drive. Is there backup software of some sort that I should be using to clone the contents of the drive rather than the drag and drop method?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm curious as to what you meant by "tied together" - did you drag the contents of one disk to another? The difference in size might be eplained by two systems worth of information being on one disk.

I got the size differential when I did Get Info on the folder of the SCSI drive backup on the CF drive. "Tying it up together" was hooking up the SCSI drive to what I'll assume was the 6500 board in the BenchMac setup because reasons. When I tried to back it up to the G3DT boot drive I'd been using I got a "System won't boot from 7.1" error. Must have been confuzzlement over the IDE boot drive on the crappy 6500 IDE bus and the SCSI ID-0 SCSI HDD I was trying to back up as startup disk. I replaced the G3DT boot drive with the StarTech/CF combo, formatted it with the first OS CD (8.1 bought new) I could find and chose the CF card as my boot drive. Ejected the 8.1 installer CD, shut down, installed the target SCSI HDD on the Zip drive extension cable of the 6400 Medusa mess in the BenchMac. System. It started right up from CF and I was able to back up the SCSI drive straight to solid state CF rather than spinning rust from the G3DT. Sweet! []

Long story short, I need to clone the 160MB drive in order to install my SuperView's drivers for test purposes on a Mac with borked video output. Massive PITA. :mellow:

 

[Cory5412]

When I drag the backed up HDD coach bus files over onto a 7.1 formatted SCSI drive they'll fit back into a 160MB partition's Mini files?

Yes.

Is there backup software of some sort that I should be using to clone the contents of the drive rather than the drag and drop method?

Not really - drag and drop is fine normally.

Disk Copy 6 should be able to image the contents of a disk to a file, provided the source disk is small enough.  I've seen some people talk about using it to image systems they get and/or make steady state copies of systems. (I believe 4 gigs is the threshold) Retrospect would be the next best option, most likely, but I don't know how it actually handles with large datasets.

 

[Cory5412]

"Tying it up together"

Just to be clear, you were copying the contents of one disk (a 160 meg disk) onto an empty larger disk (the CF card)?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Yep. The CF only had the 8.1 system on it at the time I dragged and dropped the 160MB HDD icon to copy it. CF now has documentary screenshots of the icons of every file in every folder of on the 160MB drive. I've had Retrospect from the day, but it compresses the backup files and I wanted to clone the 160MB SCSI drive bit for bit. Drag and drop has always worked for me in the past. Good to hear I don't need to worry about using something like Disk Copy 6.

 

[CC_333]

Disk Copy 6 should be able to image the contents of a disk to a file, provided the source disk is small enough.  I've seen some people talk about using it to image systems they get and/or make steady state copies of systems. (I believe 4 gigs is the threshold) Retrospect would be the next best option, most likely, but I don't know how it actually handles with large datasets.

The max image size I remember (back when I used my iMac G3 full time) for Disk Copy is 2 GB, regardless of whatever filesystem the image is formatted with.

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