How to fix or solve the size / size on disk discrepancy

[Hero_X]

Hey guys,

So if you read my other thread, I have a drive that failed on me. I have another drive I believe had mostly similar files as the drive that failed; however, this original drive i kinda fucked up by accidentally formatting something on it long ago. That being said, I was able to recover the data using a recovery program and I had stored the recovered data on the earlier mentioned drive, which has now failed. The original drive is still in its formatted state so i can't access the data on it directly.


So what I did was run the recovery software again on the original drive and I saved it on a new 5 tb drive. Everything went smoothly, but now one issue I'm facing is a LARGE discrepancy between size of the data and size on disk.

The data size is 1.09 tb, while the size on disk is 2.91 tb. I don't know how this works, why this happens, or anything. I store things on this 5tb drive all the time and usually the size of the data matches size on disk. But here, there's a large discrepancy. I tried to google and understand what's going on and there's a lot of things about "clusters" and allocation and what not..which is great..but I just want the size of my data to = size on the disk.

is there any way to fix this discrepancy? Or am i going to have to re-recover all the data from the original drive, and store it elsewhere?

Sorry, I know my story is a bit confusing but I just want to know if there's a way to fix this discrepancy as I'm pretty much wasting almost 2 tb of space. :banghead:

Thanks for your help.

[revelations]

Do the number of files on each set come close? Sometimes when drives have issues the amount of space taken isnt reported correctly.

[Hero_X]

There's a discrepancy there as well.

As per the recovery program the number of files that can be recovered are 45,568. The files that are recovered on the new hdd is 42,852.

[revelations]

Files that can be recovered almost never = files recovered

[Hero_X]

Does that mean that this discrepancy cannot be resolved and the super-sized files/folders are it?

[Seth1968]

Originally posted by revelations
Files that can be recovered almost never = files recovered

So true.



Originally posted by Hero_X
Does that mean that this discrepancy cannot be resolved .

That's right.

The discrepancy isn't an "error". Due to the way in which recovery programs work, you'll have thousands of tiny files that are much smaller than the each cluster on the disk. So each of those tiny files gets reported as using a full cluster.

In other words, a cluster can hold one file, and each cluster is typically 4KB. All of those thousands of files that are much smaller than each cluster, still have to use a full cluster.

[Seth1968]

This got me curious, so I looked into it. If you do indeed have thousands of tiny files, then you would have to save them to a drive that has been formatted using the lowest possible allocation size.

[jacky4566]

No way this is a sector issue.

Lets say the drive has 4096B sectors and there are 42,852 files AND they all ended right at the start of a cluster. Lets say 20B into a new sector each time. 42852 files*4076B of empty sector space = 0.17Gb size on disk.

Not even close to the 1.82Gb being reported here (2.91 - 1.09 tb)

Hero_X what is all this data? Looks like a windows backup wit that many files. My suggestion would be to reformat the drive again and copy all your data using the plain windows copy tool.

[Seth1968]

Yes, the difference seems extreme, but it's hard to imagine what else it could be.

What if the disk was formatted using the largest cluster size?

BTW- Thanks for that Jacky, as this is getting into details that I normally don't bother with.

[Hero_X]

Originally posted by jacky4566
No way this is a sector issue.

Lets say the drive has 4096B sectors and there are 42,852 files AND they all ended right at the start of a cluster. Lets say 20B into a new sector each time. 42852 files*4076B of empty sector space = 0.17Gb size on disk.

Not even close to the 1.82Gb being reported here (2.91 - 1.09 tb)

Hero_X what is all this data? Looks like a windows backup wit that many files. My suggestion would be to reformat the drive again and copy all your data using the plain windows copy tool.

The data is documents, family photos videos, movies, music, etc. It is not a windows back up.

So I can try to reformat the drive I want to store to, but what should be the allocation unit size, to ensure I get the full space?

Also, the drive that I was recovering from has been formatted on to. So because of this I keep having to use a recovery program to recover the data, and the program just finds the data and allows me to recover it to a destination. I'm thinking the recovery program may be doing something as well that's causing such a inflation. But i'm not sure. I'm using Lsoft Active@ File Recovery.


I can definitely format the drive and try to recover the files again but I don't know if it will be any different the second time. Plz advise, thanks.

[Seth1968]

From my experience (and it seems Rev's as well), most of the files that say "recoverable" won't open in the associated program, as the files are too corrupt. Given the massive amount of corrupt files that are being saved, perhaps Windows isn't able to read and/or write the files with accuracy.

BTW- Did you recover to a single large folder you created? If so, post a screen shot of the folder's properties. Also, what does the free space show?

[colsankey]

If i understand correctly:
Drive A failed and is garbage
Drive B had similair files, bur was accidently formatted
You have done the recovery on B and have 42,850 odd files

I would copy all the B files to an entirely new drive, call it C

Take a picture of Bs label on top. We can tell you what size it is.

Format B and reinstall your OS on it with the correct size.
If you already have an OS installed on another drive, keep B as another data drive. or backup to it and leave it at a friends or family members house in case of fire/theft.

Sort the files on C at your leisure, it will take some time to find whats good, and whats garbage, and move then into movies/pictures files/music etc

Then do backups on drive C from time to time

[Seth1968]

Another possibility is to run Tree Size on the recovered data. This will show the file details and you may find that some files are corrupt and claiming way more disk space than should be.

http://www.jam-software.de/treesize_free/?language=EN

[Hero_X]

Originally posted by Seth1968
Another possibility is to run Tree Size on the recovered data. This will show the file details and you may find that some files are corrupt and claiming way more disk space than should be.

http://www.jam-software.de/treesize_free/?language=EN

I did that on the drive that has the recovered data and it claims "1.1 tb size" & "1.1 tb allocated". So could windows be just reporting it wrong? Or is the data in fact taking up the full 2.91 tb as per the folder properties?

Update: When i try to get properties of drive from disk management, i get the same capacity (3 tb being used instead of 1)


Originally posted by colsankey
[B]If i understand correctly:
Drive A failed and is garbage
Drive B had similair files, bur was accidently formatted
You have done the recovery on B and have 42,850 odd files

I would copy all the B files to an entirely new drive, call it C

Hi, the problem is I have to use the recovery software to actually copy the files from the B drive.

I used the software once, where I did a superscan and it scanned and found the 42k files on drive B. Then I used the "recover" feature of the software and pointed it to drive C for storage. Drive C is claiming this folder that contains the recovered files is 1.1 tb in size but 2.91 tb in size on disk. So for whatever reason, there's more capacity being taken up on Drive C (which is the reason for this thread).

I will definitely be doing backups and shit after this fiasco. :banghead:

P.S. my OS is on a separate drive so no issue there.

[Seth1968]

What does the free space show?

[Seth1968]

Originally posted by Hero_X


I did that on the drive that has the recovered data and it claims "1.1 tb size" & "1.1 tb allocated". So could windows be just reporting it wrong? Or is the data in fact taking up the full 2.91 tb as per the folder properties?

[B] Update: When i try to get properties of drive from disk management, i get the same capacity (3 tb being used instead of 1)


That's quite a contradiction between the two. I suspect that if it was 1 tb of non-corrupt files, all would be fine.

For kicks, try running a defrag and chkdsk /f on the drive.

[Hero_X]

Neither defrag or chkdsk resolve anything.

[Seth1968]

Ya, they were long shots.

Does TreeSize show any file that's taking up much more space than it's supposed to?

For example, a fairly common complaint is, "Something is taking up a lot of my hard drive space". TreeSize then shows a corrupt file that takes up 100x more hard drive space than it should. Now of course, it actually isn't taking up that much space, but due to the corruption, that's how Windows sees it.

[Seth1968]

Also, I now kind of digress and go back to my possibility of Windows unable to accurately process thousands of tiny corrupt files with invalid file names, virtually no meta-data, etc.

I guarantee that if the files didn't have the above invalid and corrupt attributes, then the issue would not occur.

[Hero_X]

Update:


Okay so I thought I should copy the recovered files on my drive, to another external drive (temporarily), and as I was looking at the folder of the recovered files there were few really weird files in there.

When I copied the folder and tried to paste in external drive, the transfer didn't start and it seemed to get stuck on one of the weird files. So I went back and deleted the few random files that were there. Then copied the recovered folder to the external drive.

I came back to the comp after to check and the transfer had finished, but what was so bizarre was this:


The drive I originally recovered the files to, no longer shows the recovered folder to be 2.91 tb. Instead it is 1.09 tb, with both size and size on disk matching. And my drive capacity is being reported accurately.

I checked the external drive, and found that both size and size on disk matched, and the size of the folder was also 1.09 tb.

?!?!

So I guess there were some corrupt files in there that were fcking up the reporting of the folder size. Seth1968 - seems like you were correct about the corrupt files.

So as it stands everything is good now. But should i still format the drive (that was reporting discrepancy) ? And if so, what would be a good allocation size to ensure full size? I just don't want to get any errors on it later on.


THANK YOU VERY MUCH EVERYONE FOR HELPING ME OUT WITH THE ISSUE! I APPRECIATE IT!!!