# Why does the same files on my external hard drive and Macbook Pro take up diff GBs?



## Chanelle (Feb 25, 2017)

My goal is to free up space on my Macbook Pro (El Capitan), so I copied 17.8GB worth of videos from hard drive to my external hard drive, but its now 11.87GB on my external hard drive. Everything looks like it was copied, but I dont know why the space is different.


Please help me to understand why the GBs are different on my computer and external hard drive. Is the quality of videos lower in my external hard drive? Should I delete the videos from my computer now that I’ve copied it into my external hard drive?


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## MartyF81 (Jan 23, 2013)

They should be the same size... I would delete them off the external and try again.

There can be some variances if the drives are formatted differently.... but that is a big difference.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Questions;
How big are the two hard drives in question?
How many video files are there?
What are the block sizes on each drive?
What are the typical file sizes of the video files?
How exactly did you copy them (In a large batch or smaller batches, or single files.)?
How long have you acquiring the files (Over the course of months/years, or all at once.)?


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## Chanelle (Feb 25, 2017)

Hey MartyF81 and Sinclair _tm , 

I tried at least 3 times and have failed  not sure what to do but here are some info to help solve this.

1. My Macbook is a 13 inch, 250GB and I am on El Capitan version 10.11.16

2. My external hard drive is 1TB

3. I have about 649 videos and is 17.8GB when I click on "get info" on my Photos app

4. I have no idea what block sizes are even after I googled it. (please let me know how i can find out as I'm a noob)

5. A typical file size of a video is about 5mb I'd say. very small.

6. I copied them by dragging all 649 videos on one go into my 1TB external hard drive.

7. Video have been acquiring since 2013

I hope all these info helps cause I really need the 17.8GB of space to to be free

Thanks in advance! please let me know what other info i can provide


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## Chanelle (Feb 25, 2017)

sinclair_tm said:


> Questions;
> How big are the two hard drives in question?
> How many video files are there?
> What are the block sizes on each drive?
> ...


Hey, was wondering if anyone could help?


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