I had a problem with album covers getting mixed up and being allocated to the wrong albums. i reset data and now have 458Mb of data allocation to 'other' in itunes.

is this right or should i restore?

Sounds a lot, unless you have lots of large applications/themes/own data.

damn. only have a couple of themes, and 3 small apps.

where shouls i look for rogue data?

i have a feeling that the tunes got corrupted and so i havent deleted everything....

/private/var/fonts has 39,000kb with

arialuni.ttf being 23meg
applegothicregular.ttf 10meg

/private/var/fonts/cache
/private/var/log/system.log 58meg
/private/var/Fonts/Cache/STXihei.ttf 15meg
/private/var/Fonts/Cache/STHeiti.ttf 13meg
/private/var/Fonts/Cache/HiraginoKakuGothicProNW6.otf 7meg
/private/var/Fonts/Cache/HiraginoKakuGothicProNW3.otf 7meg

/System/Library/Fonts/arialuni.ttf 23 meg
/System/Library/Fonts/AppleGothicRegular.ttf 10 meg

/System/Library/Fonts/Cache/STXihei.ttf 15meg
/System/Library/Fonts/Cache/STHeiti.ttf 13 meg
/System/Library/Fonts/Cache/HiraginoKakuGothicProNW6.otf 7meg
/System/Library/Fonts/Cache/HiraginoKakuGothicProNW3.otf 7meg

/System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/Keyboard-Latin.artwork 16mrg
/System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/dict.dat 8meg
/System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/Keyboard-Japanese.artwork 4meg
/System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/Other.artwork 3meg

are these repeated?
/var/Fonts/arialuni.ttf
/var/Fonts/AppleGothicRegular.ttf

/var/Fonts/Cache/STXihei.ttf
/var/Fonts/Cache/STHeiti.ttf
/var/Fonts/Cache/HiraginoKakuGothicProNW6.otf
/var/Fonts/Cache/HiraginoKakuGothicProNW3.otf


/var/log/system.log

can someone help?

The 485 MB must be everything in /private/var/ except the things that are listed separately in iTunes. That is, everything in in /private/var/ except /private/var/mobile/Applications and /private/var/mobile/Media.

You could dive back in and simply find out where those 485 MB are (you've already found 39 of them -- though I think fonts including its subfolders adds up to about 86 MB).

How are you looking at your iPhone file system? If you use WinSCP, for example, you can right-click a folder (e.g. /private/var/root/), select Properties, and tell WinSCP to calculate the folder size -- this will be including all the subfolders. That should help you find out quickly where your missing MBs are.

By the way, /System/Library/Fonts and /private/var/fonts/ needn't be duplicates; it might be the case that /System/Library/Fonts is only a link to /private/var/fonts/. Depending on how you read the file system, there may be a way of seeing that -- e.g. in WinSCP the icon at /System/Library/Fonts/ would have a little "link" arrow.