In the thread "Snow Arithmetic" I complained ...I need to copy a 409.1 MB folder into this free space. It should certainly fit. But, after copying 296.2 MB into the free space I receive the message "The operation can't be completed because the disk is full." Yet, the image disk still has 136.1 MB Available.
I restarted into Leopard 10.5.8 on an external startup drive and tried again. But the problem has now infected the old system. 404.1 MB should fit into 412.9 MB, but does not and, yet, there are still 132 MB of free space on the image disk. I have looked further into this and discovered why I am having these problems. Do the following to see for yourself in Snow Leopard.
1. Inventory the contents of your Users folder. Logged in as the admin user "lutherfuller" , my Users folder shows a total of 529.9 MB and also contains the folders "dummy", a standard user, and "Shared" = 324 KB. The sizes show: dummy = 78 KB, lutherfuller = 529.5 MB.
I log in as dummy and find that the sizes are now: Users = 89.5 MB, dummy = 83 MB, lutherfuller = 6.21 MB,
Logged in as root, I now find that: Users = 612.8 MB, dummy = 83 MB, lutherfuller = 529.5 MB,
2. Make a copy of your Users folder Logged in as the admin user (lutherfuller), I copied mine into another partition of my internal HD. Now open the copy, then open the folder <adminUser>. Surprise! Surprise! You will see folders you can't open because you don't have sufficient privileges ... only you can open them. (And this is also of the root user!) And the size of these prohibited folders are shown as 0 KB.
Snow Leopard is showing a size for the Users folder that is smaller than its actual size. No wonder I was having a problem making a backup copy!
This looks like a big bad bug to me. What do you see?
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