Trying to figure out how many files I have in my itunes music folder, so I right clock on the folder and select properties. The file size and count never stop and actually go above the size of the actual hard drive. There should be about 65,000 files taking up about 300GB. Chckdsk and similar report no problems. Anyone see this before?
THX!
Welcome to TenForums @wolfereeno
Yes, I've seen similar, but not in iTunes. I've seen Disk Clean-up when cleaning system files saying that 4.00TB could be freed up on a 500GB drive!
The reason for this is hardlinks, a way for a file to appear in multiple folders, but all directory entries point to just the one physical copy of the file. File Explorer's properties (and Disk Clean up) count each hardlink as a separate file, so it's quite possible for the apparent 'size' to exceed the storage capacity of the drive. Apparently hardlinks are used extensively in iTunes.
More on hardlinks (from an Apple Mac perspective) here...
https://daisydiskapp.com/manual/4/en...sOverview.htmlLinks are extensively used by the operating system, by Time Machine and by many Apple apps (like iTunes, Photos etc.)...
...for hard links, it’s impossible to tell which of them is the “original” file and which is a “reference”, because all hard links to the same area on disk are indistinguishable from each other. Some apps (including Finder) do not take this fact into account and count parallel hard links twice or more times as distinct files, which produces wrong folder sizes...
I think all the above makes it imperative that users know that by default the actual files reside in C:\Users\username Folder and/or its subFolders. Unless, of course, custom storage of files is used, settings/options/preferences available in programs.
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