disk free space discrepancy between user accounts

[ignatius345]

Been futzing with this for hours now and it's driving me a little nuts. I have two user accounts on my Mac (High Sierra, MacBook Air, 128GB SSD), and the amount of free disk space in each shows differently both in the Finder and System Profiler.

In my primary account, I see just over 40 GB free, with "13.33 GB purgeable". In my secondary account, I see 28 GB free (and a much smaller 266 MB purgeable).

It seems like the secondary account just isn't seeing the space as free, which is a bit disturbing.

Just out of curiousity, I tried copying a bunch of files over to the primary account, to see if it would purge enough stuff to make room for the copies. It didn't, and I was ultimately unable to copy them over.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Is Time Machine set up differently in the two accounts?

 

[Weaselboy]

Is Time Machine set up differently in the two accounts?

Yeah... I'm thinking TM is on and those are local snapshots in the one account.

OP> Try running this command to remove local snapshots and see if that makes them match up.

tmutil  listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202301

 

[ignatius345]

Yeah... I'm thinking TM is on and those are local snapshots in the one account.

OP> Try running this command to remove local snapshots and see if that makes them match up.

tmutil  listlocalsnapshotdates / |grep 20|while read f; do tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $f; done

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202301

OK, tried that. I think the only snapshots were from today, though. I ran it on my main account and saw:

Deleted local snapshot '2018-04-03-104909'
Deleted local snapshot '2018-04-03-123009'​

And then on my secondary account and saw

Deleted local snapshot '2018-04-03-133158'​

I'm still seeing a pretty large (~6 GB) discrepancy in free space between the accounts, but oddly when I get info on my drive, the number of bytes used continues to change. Maybe they're moving toward equilibrium?

It seems like the concept of "available drive space" is a whole lot more fungible in High Sierra/APFS than it was before. The other big variable in all this is (and I didn't make the connection until now) that I recently migrated a lot of stuff into iCloud Drive, and have "Optimize Mac Storage" enabled on this machine. Is it possible that the management of that iCloud Drive file caching is causing some weirdness?

 

[ignatius345]

Interesting. Seeing a similar thing on my other Mac (which is not APFS by the way since it's a Fusion Drive) -- two user accounts show differing amounts of "free space". Not as big a deal on a drive this big, of course.

Seeing as how this is two different machines which have two very different drive setups — one APFS on an SSD; the other good old Mac OS Extended on a Fusion drive — I have to assume this is some feature/bug in High Sierra. Seems like a very sloppy UI to not have one consistent amount of available drive space for each user.