Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Copied contents of an old drive to new one, total file size differ. (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I just copied all the contents from my Sandisk M.2 500gb drive (A:) to a new Kingston M.2 1TB drive (B:).

I didn't select any system folders like "$RECYCLE.BIN" or "System Volume Information".

None of the drives have compression option selected from the disk properties.

Eventhough the A: drive has 15GB pagefile.sys dedicated in it; the total used storage says: 429GB

Where as the new drive, newly formatted, formerly empty, no pagefile says that the total used storage is: 453GB

All the hidden system folders are 0 bytes on both drives

How in the world is this possible, what am I missing?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There are various reasons this could happen. For a small difference I wouldn't worry about it. Who knows how windows is even computing that number?

Given how small the difference is, I suspect some kind of difference in how Windows is allocating space for the files. Even though you say elsewhere that all the block size info you can find is the same, filesystems have gotten very complicated, and there could be other parameters you don't see.

Another possibility would be something like sparse files, if a file has empty space on the old drive that's been turned into zeroes taking up space on the new drive. I would hope the copy tool would handle that correctly but who knows.

It could be that some parameter inside Windows itself has changed in the meantime. For example, how much space it preallocates for storing filenames in an empty folder.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Hey thank you for your response but I wouldn't call 24GBs a small difference.