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External 4TB SSD lost space

H

hsze

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 2, 2024
13
1
Hi: I use a 4 TB Samsung T7, formatted APFS with two partitions. One contains about 1.8 TB of music, the other partition contains 550 GB. The total is approx. 2.35 TB. But Diskutility shows 3.5 TB used and 480 GB available.
The invisible Spotlight DB on both partitions uses not more than 900 GB (which is tremendous imo). This still does not add up to 3.5 TB used. What can I do to recover my space?
Thanks.
 
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hsze said:
Hi: I use a 4 TB Samsung T7, formatted APFS with two partitions. One contains about 1.8 TB of music, the other partition contains 550 GB. The total is approx. 2.35 TB. But Diskutility shows 3.5 TB used and 480 GB available.
The invisible Spotlight DB on both partitions uses not more than 900 GB (which is tremendous imo). This still does not add up to 3.5 TB used. What can I do to recover my space?
Thanks.
Click to expand...
It looks like a local backup is enabled, which TimeMachine creates in case you don't have a backup disk handy. In other words, when you delete files from the Recycle Bin, they are not physically deleted, but are moved to the local backup folder. You can delete them, but there is a big problem - the system does not separate this backup from other files.
And the second problem - I don't remember the commands through the terminal for this case. I can't tell you.
 
I thought of something like a hidden TM activity, but the respective disk was never involved in a TM operation and TM was never active on the machine where it is normally attached.
Thanks anyway.
 
hsze said:
I thought of something like a hidden TM activity, but the respective disk was never involved in a TM operation and TM was never active on the machine where it is normally attached.
Thanks anyway.
Click to expand...
Glad to help! :) By the way, lost swap files can take up a lot of space if they are saved on disk. Then the paid program “daisydisk” will help. It will find everything that takes up a lot of space, from installed updates to temporary preview files.
 
Last edited:
hsze said:
Hi: I use a 4 TB Samsung T7, formatted APFS with two partitions. One contains about 1.8 TB of music, the other partition contains 550 GB. The total is approx. 2.35 TB. But Diskutility shows 3.5 TB used and 480 GB available.
The invisible Spotlight DB on both partitions uses not more than 900 GB (which is tremendous imo). This still does not add up to 3.5 TB used. What can I do to recover my space?
Click to expand...
I know I am being (annoyingly?) pedantic, but (if I have understood your post correctly) everywhere you have said Partition you really mean Volume.

You have a created a single APFS partition/container which contains 2 volumes which together currently occupy 3.5 TB according you DU. Disk Utility also tells you how much space it has allocated to each volume.

What does Disk Utility say for each volume? And how have you calculated 1.8 TB and 550 GB?

Mr.Fox said:
By the way, lost swap files can take up a lot of space if they are saved on disk. Then the paid program “daisydisk” will help.
Click to expand...
I don't think swap files come into this one as they will be on the system boot disk.

But, I absolutely agree with your advice re DaisyDisk.
 
hsze said:
but the respective disk was never involved in a TM operation and TM was never active on the machine where it is normally attached.
Click to expand...
In that case you probably don't have backup snapshots. You can check in Disk Utility. Select the volume and then in the menus, enable View > Show APFS Snapshots. Do you see any?
 
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