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How much hard drive space have I used?

S

Sonhascome

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 18, 2010
272
0
Maryland
I am trying to determine how much hard drive space that I've used, so I right clicked on the hard drive icon on my desktop and hit get info, it says that I have 407.7gbs available of 499.25gbs. Then I go to disk utility which says that I have used 147.28GBs which is much larger than what the Get info told me from my hard drive on my desktop. and just to make it a little more fun, on mackeeper when I look at disk usage it says 38.1GB . . . .so my question is which one do I believe? I ordered a 120GB ssd so I'm trying to consolidate my data to fit onto that. I had previously just done the get info and thought I was fine, but now I'm not so sure. Any help is appreciated, thanks

UPDATE!!
So I ran daisy disk and I it shows that the other 108.4GB that I've been trying to account for are .mobilebackups so then do I need that/can i delete it since I have time machine to an external drive? Will it need to be transferred over when I put my new hard drive in?

SOLUTION!!!
After a lot of searching, I've found out that Lion makes local back ups to your hard drive and it eats up a lot of space, so the solution is to turn of time machine and tell it when to back up, that way it deletes all previous .mobilebackups and will not create anymore
 
Last edited:
Info on data storage display in Mac OSX and iOS

Do you have any partitions on your main drive? Disk Utility always considers the whole drive (e.g. also formatting space, boot partitions...). Maybe your 3rd-Party App does not check that space and therefore displays less usage. Also, different applications will read data on a different base than others (see the link above).

For an accurate reading, please type in <df -h> in the console and post the output here.
 
are you using time machine? It does store local backups. OSX will free up this space if it is required, so it is not considered "used" by some programs.
 
mape2k said:
Info on data storage display in Mac OSX and iOS

Do you have any partitions on your main drive? Disk Utility always considers the whole drive (e.g. also formatting space, boot partitions...). Maybe your 3rd-Party App does not check that space and therefore displays less usage. Also, different applications will read data on a different base than others (see the link above).

For an accurate reading, please type in <df -h> in the console and post the output here.
Click to expand...

No, I don't have any partitions. I think you are right about the 3rd party app, i found out it only scans for files over 1gb. I went to terminal and put in df -h and it said that I had used 138gi of 465gi, but when i look in my "get info" tab on my hd it says I have 432Gb available. My biggest question is will I be able to fit my stuff on a 120gb ssd?

thundersteele said:
are you using time machine? It does store local backups. OSX will free up this space if it is required, so it is not considered "used" by some programs.
Click to expand...

Ok, that would make since, but would it really use 74Gb for that?
 
GGJstudios said:
Use DiskInventory X (pre-Lion), OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive.
Click to expand...

ive used some of these but none of them show the same total when you go About my Mac, then look at the storage section, that "other" section is always about 60GB for me

everywhere i read its says its system files and the OS, but the OS should not be more than 5GB so how can there be 55GB of system files
 
iisforiphone said:
ive used some of these but none of them show the same total when you go About my Mac, then look at the storage section, that "other" section is always about 60GB for me

everywhere i read its says its system files and the OS, but the OS should not be more than 5GB so how can there be 55GB of system files
Click to expand...
"System Files" includes much more than the OS. Application data is included in System Files.
 
iisforiphone said:
i guess i still find it confusing when my Application folder is 19GB and the system files are almost tripple it
Click to expand...
The system files include application caches, plists, images, logs, etc. They can easily take up more space than the apps themselves. For example, take a look at the following two folders. Get Info on them and see how many files and how much space is consumed:
/Library/Application Support
/Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support​
 
GGJstudios said:
The system files include application caches, plists, images, logs, etc. They can easily take up more space than the apps themselves. For example, take a look at the following two folders. Get Info on them and see how many files and how much space is consumed:
/Library/Application Support
/Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support​
Click to expand...

thanks for the info
 
So I've cut down more on hd space, approx another 20gb out and the disk utility still says that I have 138gb used, which means now that I have 90gb of space that I can't account for? Is that much of it local backups?
 
IStat Menu

One word...well 3 "iStat Menus 3" download it well worth it, best 'monitoring' app I have ever used it will give you all this data as well as cpu usage, memory usage, temperatures etc. I love it.
 
So I ran daisy disk and I it shows that the other 108.4GB that I've been trying to account for are .mobilebackups so then do I need that/can i delete it since I have time machine to an external drive? Will it need to be transferred over when I put my new hard drive in?
 
After a lot of searching, I've found out that Lion makes local back ups to your hard drive and it eats up a lot of space, so the solution is to turn of time machine and tell it when to back up, that way it deletes all previous .mobilebackups and will not create anymore
 
Just use an external HDD as a Time Machine and you will be fine.

If you are worried about the disk usage, I suggest you do a clean install on the new SSD. Install Apps as desired and see how that works. This way, a lot of files that accumulate with usage are not transferred over.

You can also disable the safe hibernation, so no image file (usually in the order of your RAM) is created. Another 4-8Gigs saved there.
 
mape2k said:
Just use an external HDD as a Time Machine and you will be fine.

If you are worried about the disk usage, I suggest you do a clean install on the new SSD. Install Apps as desired and see how that works. This way, a lot of files that accumulate with usage are not transferred over.

You can also disable the safe hibernation, so no image file (usually in the order of your RAM) is created. Another 4-8Gigs saved there.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the input, I'll look into that. The weird thing about was that I was using an external drive for time machine so I'm not sure why it started backing up to my internal HD in the first place
 
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