My latest "rookie" mistake despite my decades of experience

[KBeezie]

While back I got an 8TB external HDD to back stuff up after an old 1.5TB Seagate drive died on me (which after some time came back up long enough for me to pull files off of it intact til it died again from hardware fault).

Kept wondering how I filled up my 8TB so quickly and that performance was hurting for a USB 3.0 drive (at best 35MB/sec etc transfers etc). Especially since I had formatted it as exFat with a 32Kb partition (a little less than the typical default to accomidate for a halfway point between large and smaller files).

The thing was... I didn't.

I formatted it with a 32 Megabyte cluster size. So basically means a 1kb text file will still take up 32MB on the drive, and likewise a 36MB file will consume 64MB on the drive. So essentially depending on file size I could have a folder that's maybe 100GB but consuming 700GB of disk space due to cluster size.

So now I'm in the process of going thru and seeing where the bulk of my smaller files are, 7zipping them into stored containers (since it'll span as a single file), and then when there's enough free space from that, defragment and then resize the partition and just go ahead and make a NTFS partition to transfer to since I haven't used the external on a mac in like forever and will want the journaling anyways.

 

[wjiang]

Where's your tier 3 backup? Can't you just nuke the tier 2 backup (the external HDD) after confirming that all data is on tier 3 as well and copy fresh from the active store (tier 1)?

 

[KBeezie]

Where's your tier 3 backup? Can't you just nuke the tier 2 backup (the external HDD) after confirming that all data is on tier 3 as well and copy fresh from the active store (tier 1)?

That is my 3rd among sourced from everything else (I don't have multiple 8TBs and I don't have the money for that).

One of my smaller 3TB internals is my 2nd teird. Then I have several smaller portable backups that I pull out for older stuff to copy onto, then just stash away when not using them.

Otherwise I would have done just what you said (as I've already done somewhat with stuff that pre-existed on the internal). I'm doing what I can with the lack of funds I have.

 

[PakkyT]

This is one of those lessons that often times just using the default settings are perfectly fine for most users. As your gain for trying to customize things is usually small vs. when you screw things up and it all goes terribly wrong.

Good luck with the restructuring.

 

[KBeezie]

This is one of those lessons that often times just using the default settings are perfectly fine for most users. As your gain for trying to customize things is usually small vs. when you screw things up and it all goes terribly wrong.

Good luck with the restructuring.

at least I didn't lose anything for such a lesson, just time/annoyance.

If I had the money I'd just get another one just like it (which has the red drives inside), and just duplicate it over in the default setup, then format previous, and duplicate back over.