File property size discrepancy

[Yvonne]

I have made some back-up copies of just my important files by going into
Windows Explorer and using the copy / paste feature. One curious thing -
when I copied a directory on the main hard over to the second hard drive I
have .. some of the property file sizes were reporting a different size.

For example a directory may indicate that there are 49,679,314 bytes in that
directory. That very same directory on my other hard drive will indicate
that there are 49,689,042 bytes.

I carefully compared all the files and sub-directories within that directory
and there were no size discrepancies. Going back to the main directory
properties was where I noticed the difference.

Why is this?

 

[Guest]

Hi Yvonee:

It does not sound like anything to woryy about. One explanation would be
that, when you copy a group of files to the second hard drive, any
fragmentation (think of fragmentation as air bubbles in your Jello) was
corrected. This would make the "size on disk" value lower. There are other
reasons this migh occur such as differentiation in cluster size, etc. but
really no need to worry.

Mark