More Housecleaning, on a rainy day

Here's where we left off yesterday - trying to clean my computer, repair my crashing iPhoto software and fix up permissions on my damaged drive.

Capacity : 232.6 GB (249,715,376,128 Bytes)

Available : 121.5 GB (130,462,179,328 Bytes)

Used : 111.1 GB (119,253,196,800 Bytes)

Number of Files : 868,750

Number of Folders : 203,911

I'm happy to report the iPhoto crashing has been repaired, and the damaged drive has been fixed too. Now we just need to run a capacity report and see where we have ended up! Do I have more clean space?

Capacity : 232.6 GB (249,715,376,128 Bytes)

Available : 116.3 GB (124,861,341,696 Bytes)

Used : 116.3 GB (124,854,034,432 Bytes)

Number of Files : 916,206

Number of Folders : 205,894

Alas, this looks like more data rather than less! How did that happen? It's like going to a garage sale in your neighborhood - you take things over to sell and come back with more than you took ...

I can tell you what happened. I have an external drive and I moved a lot of things over there, thus cleaning the drive inside the computer. But my iPhoto database (27 GB and 50,000 photos) was on that external drive. In order to rescue the data, I had to move all the photos to my internal drive and create a new database.

I decided I don't want to move the photos back to the external drive (just for the blog clean-up) because it's slower and would take me more than an hour.

Now a question! Did you notice in the statistical report above that I have used almost exactly half of the total space on this drive?

Available : 116.3 GB (124,861,341,696 Bytes)

      Used : 116.3 GB (124,854,034,432 Bytes)

Both say 116.3 GB but when you look at the detailed figures, there's very slightly more available than was used. Do you think I could create a file exactly the right size to split the difference?? Let's see:

 124,861,341,696
-124,854,034,432

we can lose the 1248 at the front to simplify things a little bit

 61,341,696

-54,034,432

   7,307,264

So I need to create some thing(s) that use 7,307,264 bytes. How do I do that? I looked for a file of the right size and copied it. That was too big, so I took it off (emptied the trash) and tried a few others. I got to this point:

Available : 116.3 GB (124,857,974,784 Bytes)

        Used : 116.3 GB (124,857,401,344 Bytes)

 974,784
-401,344
 573,440

Now I need only 573,440 bytes. A little more trial and error, and I came up with this:

Available : 116.3 GB (124,857,679,872 Bytes)

      Used : 116.3 GB (124,857,696,256 Bytes) 

That's even closer to the middle. Nearly perfect, in fact, when you think in computer terms.

 96,256
-79,872
 16,384

I can't seem to get any closer than 16k (16 x 1024 = 16,384) because that's a sector on my hard drive and even the smallest file takes up that amount of room. And if I keep fooling around, caches and buffers fill up, emails sneak in, and my count gets wacky.

So this is how you use your garage sale and elementary math skills to entertain yourself on a rainy day!