For some time I have been tracking the capacity information reported by Dashboard and the capacity of my internal hard drives, which are backed up by the Drobo FS. I wanted to try to get some sense of whether the changes in the Drobo free and used space bore any resemblance to the capacity and use of my hard drives.
I reset my Drobo in mid February and once the original backup was complete, Dashboard showed I had used 1.54 TB of disk space (~21%). Over the nearly two months since then, those numbers had crept up to 1.56 TB and 22%, respectively.
Yesterday, I installed the new version of Dashboard (2.8.1) After installation, my used space went to 1.59 TB (still 22%), which seemed a little strange but not startling. But checking it tonight, I have now jumped from 1.59 TB to 2.15 TB (30%). I did some work between the two times I checked over the last two days but haven’t downloaded anything sizable. I am running a Mac Pro (Early 2009) with four internal 1 TB hard drives. Obviously, there is a lot of information on Drive 1 I don’t back up. And the data stored on drives 2, 3, and 4 doesn’t change very often.
The last time I had checked the Mac Pro’s statistics before the upgrade was a week ago. Of the 4.0 TB, I had used 3.04 TB at that date. Yesterday, at the time of the download, I had used 3.07 TB, the same amount as reported this evening.
Does anyone have any ideas why I would see such a jump in Drobo used space since this upgrade of Dashboard?
hi, while i only have Das models, here are a few thoughts…
am not sure how dashboard would increase the used space on a drobo (assuming that dashboard is actually only installed on a computer and not the drobo itself), but i can see how a firmware update might change the way data is stored, in some way.
some programs tend to utilise free space on a large (or largest) volume, as temp storage… maybe a program you use such as adobe or something similar, is using your drobo as a temp scratch disk?
(on windows, some installers extracted temp data on my drobos in the past and didnt always clean up afterwards)
in theory, any drive that gets some bad sectors, might affect the amount of usable space, which the drobo may be reallocating sectors. (im not sure exactly how many spare sectors the drives can use, or what the exact limit for each drive is before a drobo will mark the drive as fully failed but it could affect your free space values)
maybe it is just some files that are gnerated as part of your light-downloading and just the general usage of yoru programs? (i think the only way to know for sure, would be to use a tool that can compare folders and subfolders, to see what has changed on a regular basis, and it might help to track down the culprit?) :)[hr]
btw are you using time machine?
Thanks, Paul. None of these seem high in the range of possibility but I’m past believing I know for sure what is going on inside my computer and the network.
Yes, I am using Time Machine. As to it being a temporary matter, I just checked right now and Dashboard is still reporting the same amount of used disk space. I’ve spent a little time looking around the Drobo with Finder and haven’t found anything strange.
Also, I only have the Drobo set up to use as a back-up. Other apps shouldn’t be using it for temp files. But I suppose crazier things have happened.
Thanks for your inputs. I have gone back a few weeks and recovered a couple of files just to be sure things are working all right and they seem to be. Beats me.
You are using Time Machine with the Drobo as the backup target?
Time Machine keeps incremental backups, so if you modify files and Time Machine runs, then you will have a copy of the file before the change you made. This will result in your used capacity creeping up over time.
Drobo doesn’t store anything on the filing system itself, so if the used capacity is creeping up, its something your computer is writing.
(folder properties might work the same way as on windows, so i guess you could also try using nothing on the mac for day or two, and then checking the amount of files and folders you have, to see if any new data files are being made in some way on the actual data partitions, but it could simply be time machine as jason mentioned which is the culprit)
