External hard drive losing free space

Hi,
Having replaced my MacBook's stock 80 GB hard drive, I purchased a FireWire drive enclosure so I could continue to use it as a backup drive. I back up my home folder manually, since I don't feel the need to purchase backup software. Recently I've noticed that deleting files on the external drive does not free up the previously-occupied space. Thus, the drive (which is shown to have 74.21 GB of total space) seems to have only 16.28 GB of free space, while both Get Info and du say that only 28 or 29 GB are being used. I'm not sure what the problem could be, or what my next steps should be. Any ideas/solutions?
Thanks in advance,
Larry

Oh wait, never mind. I had checked .Trashes from the Terminal, but usually I had ls set up to display "/" after any directories. There had been one entry in .Trashes, "501", without a slash afterwards. I had thus assumed that this was just a file. I came back after posting and figured I'd run a du on .Trashes and discovered that "501" was in fact a folder of some sort that contained 29 GB of deleted files! After deleting this folder, my drive's free space is now correct.
Thanks,
Larry

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External hard drive losing free space

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