External disk space gone crazy after upgrade to SL

Hi,
I have just upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and am now running 10.6.3. I have an iomega 320GB external USB hard disk which I use to back up via Time Machine, and also to periodically back up a virtual machine which is not backed up by Time Machine. Prior to upgrading, there was about 3GB of space on the iomega drive, the TM backups were taking about 251GB and my virtual machine backup was taking the remaining 66GB.
The first time I connected the iomega drive after upgrading to SL, I wanted to deleted the backup copy of the virtual machine (66GB), so I navigated to it in the Finder, right-clicked on the folder and selected "Move to trash", whereupon it duly disappeared. (I thought it slightly odd that I didn't hear the drive making any sound – I thought I should be able to hear it pysically deleting the file.) I then tried to copy a new virtual machine file of smaller size onto the iomega drive, and got an error message that there was not enough disk space. I selected the drive in the L/H pane of the Finder window and hit Cmd-I to get info: this told me the following:
Capacity 319.73GB
Available 1.89GB
Used 317.84GB
I know that the files I just deleted from the iomega were around 66GB, so why isn't there at least 66GB of free space? I have not run Time Machine since upgrading, so there is no way the TM backup set can have somehow expanded to fill up the additional space. I have run Disk Utility and tried repairing the drive, but this has made no difference. I then selected the Time Machine backup set on the iomega drive, which is a folder named "Backups.backupdb", and hit Cmd-I to get info. The get info window popped up and said it was calculating the size of the item. Some six-and-a-half hours later, it finally concluded its calculations and told me that the backup set is... wait for it... 4.54TB! (4,458,364,261,372B to be precise...)
What is going on? I'm aware that SL uses a different basis to measure disk space, but this does not explain where 66GB of freed up space has suddenly "disappeared" to, or why this backup set appears to be 14 times the physical size of the disk it's on!
Am I going to have to erase the drive and lose all my previous TM backups, or is there some other way around this?
Thanks in advance,
Rob

After you selected move to Trash, did you remember to then empty the Trash? When you move something to the Trash the Finder puts it in the invisible Trash folder of the drive in question, and there it stays until the Trash is emptied with the drive mounted.
I have many crackpop theories about things, and one of them is that Apple has somehow messed up the Finder's ability to calculate sizes in the newly rewritten Snow Leopard Finder. Mind you, Finder has not been very good at doing this for a very long time anyway, but it seems to me it has gotten even worse. Nonetheless it should be able to get an answer that makes sense using the GetInfo function for a drive, although it will take longer than it seems to me it ought to do (but in the range of minutes rather than hours). Thus GetInfo on my Time drive shows
Capacity 249.93GB
Available 140.95GB
Used 108.97GB
A result returned remarkably quickly (for a change). Using the disk usuage command in Terminal, where the results returned are shown in the "old" size format rather than the new PR influenced format, shows this:
NoobiX:~ francine$ sudo du -cxhd 1 /Volumes/Time
Password:
1.4M /Volumes/Time/.fseventsd
1.5G /Volumes/Time/.Spotlight-V100
0B /Volumes/Time/.TemporaryItems
0B /Volumes/Time/.Trashes
0B /Volumes/Time/.vol
5.4G /Volumes/Time/Applications
77G /Volumes/Time/Backups.backupdb
7.6M /Volumes/Time/bin
0B /Volumes/Time/cores
0B /Volumes/Time/dev
0B /Volumes/Time/home
7.0G /Volumes/Time/Library
0B /Volumes/Time/net
0B /Volumes/Time/Network
510M /Volumes/Time/private
5.2M /Volumes/Time/sbin
3.8G /Volumes/Time/System
3.8G /Volumes/Time/Users
1.0G /Volumes/Time/usr
4.0K /Volumes/Time/Volumes
100G /Volumes/Time
100G total
Terminal takes a bit of time to return the above results, but again it is in the range of some minutes, not hours. If you DID remember to empty the Trash after moving the files to it, you might try running the du command in Terminal to see where the stuff is.
Copy and paste this into Terminal
sudo du -cxhd 1
press the spacebar, then drag and drop the mounted volume into the Terminal from the Desktop. Press return, enter your admin password (which is not echoed to the screen in any way whatsoever), press return again, and go have a cup of coffee while the sizes are calculated.
Finally, the repair disk function in Disk Utility is not particularly robust. To truly repair a disk with siginificant problems you need something like Disk Warrior.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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