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Finder tallies folder sizes incorrectly!?!?! WTW?

A

andr nimm

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 29, 2008
27
0
Totals.jpg


Finder arithmetic problem...?

I noticed my total HD use seemed to have jumped significantly in the last couple of weeks when I started a backup of the drive in Time Machine. At first I was just amazed I had somehow gotten to fill 300G of drive space, but then I realized that was not likely, and started counting folder sizes. Turns out I hadn't - there is something wrong.

Please bust out a calculator if you need to (I did) and tally up the above folder sizes, relative to the total for the HD. Disk total for HD Walty given by Finder as 308Gb, while the totals for the folders in Walty are 203Gb.

What is up with the extra 100Gb of "dark matter" on my drive?

Finder includes Desktop and Trash files in the user directory space, of course. And I just emptied the trash in both user accounts.

My first instinct was to run DiskWarrior from the DVD and rebuild the directory, it ran fine, it didn't help with the faulty arithmetic.

I have also deleted some caches via Onyx (yay onyx!). No effect on this.

Note: the tally is wrong with or without the external LaCie HD attached; I can provide another screenshot if you need to see.

What in the world?!

There don't seem to be any threads on this here or at Apple discussions.
 
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Thanks GGJ. It's the latest SL 10.6.7 with all security updates installed (including yesterdays)

100Gb of hidden files or folders would be quite a lot, I have to say. Too much! But Onyx can show these hidden files, I will turn that on right now and look.

Also, I'm running Disk Inventory right now too. It's showing total disk usage as 286Gb.

Edit: I turned on hidden files/folders with Onyx, and the folder totals still do not add up at all. Virtually unchanged.
 
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You might be ok with Disk Inventory, but I've found that other disk inventory apps like GrandPerspective won't show the size of your Spotlight cache.

If you don't see anything from your disk check, take a look at your /.Spotligh-V100 folder - open Terminal from an admin account and type 'sudo du - h /.Spotlight-V100'

This was 30GB+ on my Mac Mini HTPC a few weeks ago - leaving me only a couple of GB free. It wouldn't show up in GrandPerspective or WhatSize. I re-indexed by adding my Macintosh HD to the Spotlight privacy list, then removing it. After re-indexing it was 1.8GB.
 
Thanks PLinden. I'm having Onyx dump and rebuild the spotlight index right now. I hope that serves the same purpose as not indexing and re-indexing the HD. But if not, I will do exactly what you did.

Here's an image of the hidden files and folders total, at the bottom.

Note that spotlight-v100 is an off-limits folder here. Is that right? It hasn't been changed since 2008?

I got an error message in terminal when i did the sudo command you suggested: "No such file or directory". Terminal did not give me a file size for that either, is it supposed to?0

Hiddentotals.jpg


termspotlight.jpg
 
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andr nimm said:
Thanks PLinden. I'm having Onyx dump and rebuild the spotlight index right now. I hope that serves the same purpose as not indexing and re-indexing the HD. But if not, I will do exactly what you did.

Here's an image of the hidden files and folders total, at the bottom.

Note that spotlight-v100 is an off-limits folder here. Is that right? It hasn't been changed since 2008?

I got an error message in terminal when i did the sudo command you suggested: "No such file or directory". Terminal did not give me a file size for that either, is it supposed to?0

Image

Image
Click to expand...

No space between - and h:
sudo du -h /.Spotlight-V100

-h tells du to display the size in human-readable form.

Edit: 16 tells you the number of blocks, which is about 8kB. How's your missing HDD space after starting the re-indexing?
 
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PLinden- understood. I just fixed my -h syntax. I reckon it's showing the V100 at 60 blocks now, but Spotlight is still indexing.

However, the phantom 100Gb is still unaccounted for, more or less. Deleting the Spotlight index seems to have saved me about 4Gb.

Onyx deleted all sorts of caches and logs, too, but that doesn't seem to have nicked the problem.

Here's the terminal readout of space in the spotlight index file.

Screen%20shot%202011-06-03%20at%205.16.30%20PM.jpg
 
Looks like Spotlight isn't the problem.

Try the following command. This will take some time:
sudo du -h -d 1 -x /

This will list the size of every directory under the root directory. You can drill down into the various directories (e.g. du -h -d 1 /Applications)
 
your /private folder is taking up almost a gig, you probably have large swap files in /private/var/vm. seems normal, just trash the swap files if you want and reboot. also /private/var/db takes up a bit with its dyld cache and /private/var/folders stores temp stuff.

heres mine, lots of swap from leaving VMware open all day.

Screen shot 2011-06-04 at 2.45.21 .png
 
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