DE HFS Calculate Size larger than drive size

[Eastcoast]

Not the first time I have seen it, and I am sure there is a perfectly good reason, but why is it when I sometimes do a ‘calculate size’ on the full root of a HFS partition, i discover the amount of calculated Data is larger than the size of the drive?

For Example I have a 1TB drive that I can read perfectly, but with Data Extractor, the amount of extractable data is 1.4TB.

[Eastcoast]

I think the answer is related to the private data folder and also the time machine backup folder possibly having multiple versions of the same files. I can see it hard to justify/explain the discrepancy of extra data to a customer, especially in the cases of an almost full drive recovery needing to go to a larger destination drive. I guess to be safe, and if it were possible, when dealing with HFS, would be to do a direct to disk (sector by sector clone), rather than a file copy to drive.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[Dmitri]

You could be seeing folder with metadata, which contains hardlinks, and they are counted as files.

[Eastcoast]

You could be seeing folder with metadata, which contains hardlinks, and they are counted as files.

Thanks for the reply Dmitri. Yes, it does appear to be the reason. I compared a good HFS volume in FINDER and in DE and it appears to be the reason. I believe the folder can be ignored when extracting.