What's taking up space?

[Vinsanity93]

I was backing up my laptop, which had about 100GB of used space, to my external using a program. In that program I selected backup everything but when it finished, it only copied about 30GB so that means that 70GB of information was not copied. What is all this extra stuff taking up my HDD?

I do have a guest account activated but its rarely used.

 

[lunatic59]

Couple of things ... If it's only copying user data, the rest is apps and OS. Or, it could be compressing the backup. What program are you using to backup?

 

[Vinsanity93]

Carbon Copy Cloner

 

[lunatic59]

Do you have time machine enabled? Could be that CCC doesn't include that data.

 

[Vinsanity93]

No I don't use time machine but CCC does make backups bootable so it should be getting everything.

 

[SUroot]

as an IT professional I probably shouldn't say this, but I use the simple right click > properties method. I start at the root of c: and identify the largest folder. I manually drill down until I know where all my space has gone.

 

[MacFett]

as an IT professional I probably shouldn't say this, but I use the simple right click > properties method. I start at the root of c: and identify the largest folder. I manually drill down until I know where all my space has gone.

Try jdiskreport... Unless you get paid hourly.

JDiskReport | JGoodies

 

[SUroot]

Looks good but its not like manually drilling down takes any more than 2 minutes. Plus the ai of such a programme will not remove the necessity of me having to make human decisions as to what is needed. Something I already do as part of the drilling down process