Disk Utility & Finder reporting very different Free Space

[ggabriele3]

A while ago, I had a Boot Camp partition. There were some errors initially when I removed it, but the partition did eventually go away. I need Windows again, so I'm about to do Boot Camp again.

To prep for this, I ran Verify Disk, and there were some errors, so I booted into the recovery partition and fixed them.

Now, back in OSX:
Disk Utility is showing 156.47GB used, 93.67GB free.
Finder says it has 205GB free.
(I have the 250GB drive)

very weird: while I was typing this, it changed.
Disk Utility is showing 156.52GB used, 93.62GB free.
Finder says it has 208.18GB free.
Disk Utility reports no errors on this partition.

Does this sound like a hardware problem, or should I just do a complete wipe of the drive and re-install?

 

[Yahooligan]

Doesn't actually sound like a problem at all, do you have Time Machine configured and backing up? If so, you probably also have Time Machine local backups enabled as well, these are "hidden" and are a common cause of confusion and differences in space usage reporting.

This gives a good explanation about what's going on...

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

And here's how you can disable or (re)enable them...

http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/28/disable-time-machine-local-backups-in-mac-os-x-lion/

 

[ggabriele3]

I have a time machine backup on a network disk. I find it hard to accept that the local time machine snapshot could be 50+gb.

 

[Yahooligan]

I have a time machine backup on a network disk. I find it hard to accept that the local time machine snapshot could be 50+gb.

Oh, they can, and the local snapshots are created when you're disconnected from the Time Machine disk, such as when mobile/away from home in order to have deletion protection and file versioning.

Your experience is typical and not a problem.

 

[mneblett]

I find it hard to accept that the local time machine snapshot could be 50+gb.

Accept it -- I had nearly 100GB of local backup on my 250GB SSD.

If your system needs to, it will overwrite it. In my case, mine self-deleted after a while -- it may have been after I came come from a weekend away and my network backup disk was again available.