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This is driving me nuts, on my new MacBook it initially had iCloud turned on by default and when I started copying the couple hundred gigs of files from my old MacBook to the desktop of this one it quickly ran out of space on iCloud. When I realized this, I didn't want to pay for storage so I disabled iCloud and that very scarily deleted all of my files off my desktop and actually brazenly moved them to the "iCloud Drive (Archive)" folder. After I realized all that and copied the files back to my Desktop, I just left this folder as a backup. But now a few months later when I look at the size of the folders in both Finder or with du something doesn't add up. It says Desktop is ~289GB and iCloud Archive is ~209GB, but the disk is only 466GB. And I recursively searched for symlinks in the folders to make sure they weren't any and didn't find anything, so I'm not sure what the discrepancy is? Thanks for your help.

wendy@Wendys-MBP:~$ du -hs -I Library *
      0B    Applications
    464K    Creative Cloud Files
    289G    Desktop
    288K    Documents
    8.0K    Downloads
    1.9G    Dropbox
     16K    Movies
    128M    Music
     12K    Pictures
      0B    Public
    136K    bin
    209G    iCloud Drive (Archive).old
wendy@Wendys-MBP:~$ df -h
    Filesystem                      Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused               ifree %iused  Mounted on
    /dev/disk1s1                   466Gi  438Gi   21Gi    96% 1192024 9223372036853583783    0%   /
    devfs                          188Ki  188Ki    0Bi   100%     654                   0  100%   /dev
    /dev/disk1s4                   466Gi  6.0Gi   21Gi    23%       6 9223372036854775801    0%   /private/var/vm
    map -hosts                       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%       0                   0  100%   /net
    map auto_home                    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%       0                   0  100%   /home
    darwin:/home/www/htdocs/wendy  458Gi  236Gi  199Gi    55%  364662            30166922    1%   /Volumes/wendy
    /dev/disk1s3                   466Gi  487Mi   21Gi     3%      37 9223372036854775770    0%   /Volumes/Recovery

total size in finder over 200GB folders

ndeubert
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  • You do not say what version of macos. You do not say how you have formated the drive. – historystamp Apr 02 '20 at 21:27
  • With APFS, when you copy or duplicate a file, it isn't copied or duplicated right of way. Files are divided into blocks. The directory entry contains pointers to all the blocks. On file copy, only the directory entry with associated points are copy to the new directory entry. [ This is the general idea. ] When a file block is changed, it is copied and changed. I think of it as a lazy write. These legacy unix commands don't know about the lower level apfs workings. – historystamp Apr 02 '20 at 21:41
  • A file or directory that is hard linked will show in all places it us linked into – mmmmmm Apr 03 '20 at 08:43
  • @historystamp I have Mojave 10.14.6, and Disk Utility (screenshot above) shows it as a single APFS partition (I didn't change it from the default setup). Thank you for the explanation, so is it safe to delete "iCloud Drive Archive" folder and it will only keep the pointers to the copied files in the "Desktop" folder instead? Should I only delete from Finder or are the command line utils ok to use too? I just don't want to lose anything. Thanks. – ndeubert Apr 04 '20 at 13:57
  • @user151019 is there a way to display all the hard links? Recursively? Or is that abstracted into the filesystem? Thanks. – ndeubert Apr 04 '20 at 13:58
  • I am on 10.10.5, so I have no first hand experience. I do not trust iCloud. I have a full backup with Carbin Copy Cloner and a time machine backup. – historystamp Apr 04 '20 at 20:35
  • @user151019 FYI. These are not unix hard links. The magic is done by the filesystem. It's hidden behind closed doors. – historystamp Apr 04 '20 at 20:38

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