Free space varies on when and where I look?

[thomamon]

OK, so the battery has gotten much better, but I am noticing that depending when and where I look the amount of free space varies. It shows less space after I reboot as available, but if I wait it'll show an additional 100GB free. Also depends if I look at finder or go to About This Mac and look at storage.

I am seriously thinking of just starting over and reformatting and reinstalling everything.

Any opinions, thoughts or tips?

 

[flyinmac]

OK, so the battery has gotten much better, but I am noticing that depending when and where I look the amount of free space varies. It shows less space after I reboot as available, but if I wait it'll show an additional 100GB free. Also depends if I look at finder or go to About This Mac and look at storage.

I am seriously thinking of just starting over and reformatting and reinstalling everything.

Any opinions, thoughts or tips?

Remember that in addition to real memory installed in your machine, it also has a temporary swap file that expands and contracts in size as needed.

You may simply be seeing the change in that swap file's size as you perform tasks.

 

[Waban]

I'm guessing you're on High Sierra?

This was really bugging me for a while too, used all kinds of utilities looking at disk space and exactly what was on the disk to try and figure out the issue, finally got to the bottom of it (in my case anyway).

It's Time Machine. High Sierra makes local backups with TM. Even if you have automatic turned off. There is no way to stop it (there used to be, but Apple have removed every way of stopping it now).

You can check to see if that is the issue, and if you want remove them manually you can, but your mac will only make new ones again so I don't bother. Have a look here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...machine-local-backups-on-high-sierra.2073998/

We used to be able to run "sudo tmutil disablelocal" to turn them off, but High Sierra removed it. Part of the slow but steady removal of control we have. Such a pity the best OS is in decline. I still prefer it to anything else, but the gap is getting very narrow now.

 

[thomamon]

I went ahead and reset up the machine as new, installed everything from scratch instead of from a Time Machine Backup. It is running much better now. Battery is MUCH better and no craziness in changes of free/Used space!