wrong used space in Finder after running diskutil

[msvadi]

To resolve some of the issues I've been having with my Mac, an agent from Apple Support told me to repair permissions by running:

diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`

After the call ended, I noticed that Finder now shows wrong amount of free space: It doubled the amount of used space from before running the diskutil command. Is there an easy way to fix this?

I saw on the web that the issue can be related to Time Machine, but turning Time Machine off and on did not help. Neither did disabling local snapshots with "sudo tmutil disablelocal".

Thanks

 

[dianeoforegon]

See the KB for more info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538

 

[msvadi]

See the KB for more info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538

Thanks, I've read the article, but could not find any info about why Finder would show wrong space usage after resetting permissions.

Here is a snapshot of the current storage usage. It shows that the System takes about 879GB of space!

 

[KALLT]

It sometimes helps to rebuild the Spotlight cache, this may take a while though.

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[msvadi]

It sometimes helps to rebuild the Spotlight cache, this may take a while though.

sudo mdutil -E /

Yes, I tried, but it did not help - Spotlight finished indexing but the amount of used space did not change. I now begin to suspect that Finder does show the actual space used and there is something in the System folder that takes a huge amount of space. Is there anyway to track it?

 

[Weaselboy]

Yes, I tried, but it did not help - Spotlight finished indexing but the amount of used space did not change. I now begin to suspect that Finder does show the actual space used and there is something in the System folder that takes a huge amount of space. Is there anyway to track it?

Is the issue the way the space is used in that storage readout.... or is the issue the total amount of space used?

Ignoring that storage readout, does the total space used sound about right?

 

[msvadi]

Until resetting permissions, under 1TB of space was used, after the reset, it's 1.7TB. Initially I though that the readout was wrong, but now I'm suspecting it's correct, because Time Machine seems to be preparing a huge backup. The amount of space taken certainly sounds wrong, it should be under 1TB.

 

[Weaselboy]

Until resetting permissions, under 1TB of space was used, after the reset, it's 1.7TB. Initially I though that the readout was wrong, but now I'm suspecting it's correct, because Time Machine seems to be preparing a huge backup. The amount of space taken certainly sounds wrong, it should be under 1TB.

Try running this command in Terminal. Give it a minute to complete then post the results up here. It will give you an accurate listing of all the base folders and a total in GB.

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

 

[msvadi]

Thanks. The results:

1 /.DocumentRevisions-V100

1 /.fseventsd

0 /.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware

3 /.Spotlight-V100

0 /.vol

14 /Applications

1 /bin

0 /cores

1 /dev

1 /home

2 /Library

2 /macOS Install Data

1 /net

0 /Network

1 /opt

5 /private

1 /sbin

8 /System

763 /Users

6 /usr

784 /Volumes

1582 /

1582 total

 

[KALLT]

It seems that ‘About this Mac’ is wrong. Can you try it without having any drives attached?

 

[msvadi]

It seems that ‘About this Mac’ is wrong. Can you try it without having any drives attached?

There are no drives attached. There is an external drive for Time Machine backups, but it's on the network.

 

[KALLT]

The command above should actually exclude any remote locations (it should basically just be empty folders). I am curious why it doesn’t. The huge size of /Volumes could explain the discrepancy in About this Mac. Can you disconnect the drive and try the command again?

 

[msvadi]

I disconnected the network drive, restarted the computer, disconnected the Mac from the network, but the result was exactly the same:

784 /Volumes

The /Volumes folder contains two folders: "Macintosh HD" and "Time Machine Backups"
[doublepost=1486363194][/doublepost]By the way, resetting permissions that I was instructed to do by Apple Care agent did not resolve the original problem I'm having with the Mac: random reboots. It automatically rebooted today with the following messages in the system log:

Feb 5 15:15:23 MBP17 acvpnagent[43]: Function: getInterfaces File: ../../vpn/Common/Utility/NetInterface_unix.cpp Line: 1330 missing PPP destination address for interface "utun6". Check profile PPPExclusion (set to Automatic?) or contact your administrator.
Feb 5 15:15:26 MBP17 diagnosticd[236]: Streaming server Unresponsive
Feb 5 15:15:26 MBP17 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.xpc.launchd.domain.system): System reboot initiated by: eoshostd.192<-launchd.1
Feb 5 19:31:53 localhost bootlog[0]: BOOT_TIME 1486351913 0
Feb 5 19:31:54 localhost syslogd[37]: Configuration Notice:
ASL Module "com.apple.AccountPolicyHelper" claims selected messages.
Those messages may not appear in standard system log files or in the ASL database.

It's really frustrating that a brand new and crazy-expensive laptop is having all these issues. I'm taking it to the Apple Store tomorrow.

 

[KALLT]

Did ‘Time Machine Backups’ consume that those 784 GB? ‘Macintosh HD’ should be empty, because it is a link to the root path. You can confirm it with this (it should say ‘Macintosh HD → /’):

ls -l

If Time Machine Backups is so big, then something is wrong. It should not be there once the drive is not attached.

It looks as though your computer shuts itself down intentionally. This may indicate a hardware problem. I reckon you aren’t using any remote access or account server (looking at Cisco AnyConnect)?

 

[Weaselboy]

784 /Volumes

The /Volumes folder contains two folders: "Macintosh HD" and "Time Machine Backups"

This is odd. You should see the Macintosh HD alias there like KALLT said, but not the Time Machine Backups if you have no drives attached. Even with drives attached it should not show 784GB in that Volumes folder. I attached two drives with 100s of GB on each and Volumes with that command always shows 1GB for me.

This is not the Time Machine local backups mentioned earlier. That would be in a hidden /.MobileBackups folder and the Terminal command would list it, so you must still have that disabled.

What do you see inside that Time Machine Backups? Can you think of anything you did that may have caused this?

 

[msvadi]

Did ‘Time Machine Backups’ consume that those 784 GB? ‘Macintosh HD’ should be empty, because it is a link to the root path. You can confirm it with this (it should say ‘Macintosh HD → /’):

ls -l

If Time Machine Backups is so big, then something is wrong. It should not be there once the drive is not attached.

It looks as though your computer shuts itself down intentionally. This may indicate a hardware problem. I reckon you aren’t using any remote access or account server (looking at Cisco AnyConnect)?

Here's the result of ls -l:

total 8

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 5 Feb 22:22 Macintosh HD -> /

d--x--x--x+ 3 root wheel 102 4 Feb 03:18 Time Machine Backups


I actually have Cisco AnyConnect Client (Version 3.1.10010) installed and use it frequently. Do you think that what causes reboots?
[doublepost=1486406314][/doublepost]

What do you see inside that Time Machine Backups? Can you think of anything you did that may have caused this?

There is the Backups.backupdb folder inside Time Machine Backups, and inside it what looks like a backup of my entire Mac, which would explain why the amount of used space is double of what it should be.

There were two things I did recently. The most recent was resetting permissions. Before that, I followed the steps described here http://pondini.org/TM/B6.html to re-connect an old backup after restoring user data from Time Machine. I believe that the problem with disk usage appeared only after resetting permissions, but I might be wrong.

 

[Weaselboy]

There is the Backups.backupdb folder inside Time Machine Backups, and inside it what looks like a backup of my entire Mac, which would explain why the amount of used space is double of what it should be.

There were two things I did recently. The most recent was resetting permissions. Before that, I followed the steps described here http://pondini.org/TM/B6.html to re-connect an old backup after restoring user data from Time Machine. I believe that the problem with disk usage appeared only after resetting permissions, but I might be wrong.

If you are seeing that 784GB Time Machine Backups there when there are no external disks attached and no other internal drives either, I think what you did was somehow during that Pondini process you copied the entire backup set from your external over into that folder. You can just delete it if that is the case.

There is no way that permissions repair caused this.

Before you do that, double check and make sure your current Time Machine backups have been going to the correct external drive.

 

[msvadi]

If you are seeing that 784GB Time Machine Backups there when there are no external disks attached and no other internal drives either, I think what you did was somehow during that Pondini process you copied the entire backup set from your external over into that folder. You can just delete it if that is the case.

There is no way that permissions repair caused this.

Before you do that, double check and make sure your current Time Machine backups have been going to the correct external drive.

Thanks, this makes sense. Time Machine settings show the correct external drive. I'll try deleting the Time Machine Folder in /Volumes
[doublepost=1486410546][/doublepost]Ok, deleting word. Now the amount of used space makes sense. It was not a wrong readout after all. Time Machine is performing a backup now. Hopefully, it all goes smoothly.

KALLT and Weaselby: Thank you so much for you help!

I still have to figure out what's going on with random automatic reboots. Maybe Cisco AnyConnect is the culprit. In addition to random reboots, the system sometimes automatically logs out all users when trying to switch user accounts. And the system log is filled with messages about vpn. Maybe I should try deleting the Cisco software and see if the problem goes away.

 

[msvadi]

It looks like Time Machine is now doing a full backup.