How much free disk space do I have?

[blasto333]

I have tried 4 utilities/programs to tell me how much disk is free and they are all different. What is accurate?
1. Disk utility
2. Finder --> get info on hard drive
3. About mac --> storage
4. Clean my Mac

See the attached screenshot.

 

[Taz Mangus]

I was curious more by what you described and I looked at my computer storage using Finder -> Get Info, About This Mac -> Storage and Disk Utility. All correlated to each other taking into account the difference of purgeable size.

Maybe boot into recovery mode (Command-R), Utilities->Disk Utility and run First Aid on your primary drive. See if that possibly helps.

 

[blasto333]

I ran disk utility in repair mode and nothing was fixed. I use apfs encrypted so not sure if yours is different

 

[KALLT]

The arrow pointing to Disk Utility shows the free space within the APFS container, i.e. space that isn’t occupied by any APFS volume (Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD – Data are the volumes in this case). Finder and About this Mac also include purgeable space as “free space”, given that it can be reclaimed at any point.

What is surprising about your screenshot is the negligible amount of purgeable space (less than a MB if I see it correctly). Perhaps CleanMyMac has initiated a “purge” and the system has not yet finished calculating the available space.

 

[blasto333]

Another thing to note is the get info on Macintosh HD can change up or down by 10-20 gb randomly

 

[Taz Mangus]

Stop Clean My Mac program and see if your disk storage usage settles down.

 

[blasto333]

I have tried this and it doesn't make a difference

 

[blasto333]

And randomly out of the blue they are matching....very odd

 

[Taz Mangus]

Do you have any anti-virus software installed? Maybe try running EtreCheck and see if it cones up with anything.

EtreCheck

etrecheck.com

 

[blasto333]

I ran etre Check and no issues with that. Clean My mac found nothing either.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Try booing into safe mode as a sanity check.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

To help determine whether an issue is caused by software that loads as your Mac starts up, you can start up your Mac in safe mode.

support.apple.com

 

[KALLT]

I don’t think there is any cause for concern here, given that the issue has resolved itself.

I would just be more cautious with cleaning tools and refrain from using them to clear caches or force the system to purge space, especially on a regular basis.

 

[Honza1]

Surprisingly, not one stated the obvious: not enough. Running at less than 10% of available space on SSD is not a good idea. You should try to keep 20-30% of space available (e.g., https://pureinfotech.com/why-solid-state-drive-ssd-performance-slows-down/). And yes, I understand it is challenge for all who cannot afford 4TB SSD drives.

 

[deviant]

time machine keeps snapshots locally until you actually back up on the disk. that space is considered free and purgeable , IF NEEDED, otherwise it will be counted as used.
you can buy daisy disk, give it full hd access and scan as admin and it will let you delete that space, but it is not needed.