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I Hate Not Easily Being Able to See How Much Hard Drive Space I Have Left!

HappyDude20

HappyDude20

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jul 13, 2008
3,688
1,479
Los Angeles, Ca
Hi guys,

A quick Lion rant. I've promised myself to stop visiting this forum for a while, in attempts of getting used to Lion, of which I've found somewhat successful.

One qualm however is how they've removed in finder on the bottom being able to see how much HD space was left..

Granted, I have a 500GB HD but uploading hundreds (almost thousands) of photos and video every week, I'd like to know where I'm at w/ my HD space.

I find it cumbersome to have to go into "About This Mac" and then Storage to see how much HD space is left. I can only assume Apple decide to forego this feature in Lion so people wouldn't think too much about how much space they had available............and it's worked. Normally I do my best to stay in the 240GB-260GB available range..but at the time of this writing i'm at 215GB's available. Time to delete some stuff I may not really need.
 
HappyDude20 said:
Hi guys,

A quick Lion rant. I've promised myself to stop visiting this forum for a while, in attempts of getting used to Lion, of which I've found somewhat successful.

One qualm however is how they've removed in finder on the bottom being able to see how much HD space was left..

Granted, I have a 500GB HD but uploading hundreds (almost thousands) of photos and video every week, I'd like to know where I'm at w/ my HD space.

I find it cumbersome to have to go into "About This Mac" and then Storage to see how much HD space is left. I can only assume Apple decide to forego this feature in Lion so people wouldn't think too much about how much space they had available............and it's worked. Normally I do my best to stay in the 240GB-260GB available range..but at the time of this writing i'm at 215GB's available. Time to delete some stuff I may not really need.
Click to expand...

Finder > View > Show Status Bar :)

(For what it's worth, I went nuts trying to reenable it myself.)
 
Last edited:
I have my Hard Disks show on my desktop and I also have the show info option selected. I can see how much free space is available on the desktop that way.
 
Just a note - I think you need to have a Finder window open and active otherwise the option is greyed out. Clicking on the desktop to bring Finder to the front was not enough, but when I opened my HD window I could select the option. Drove me nuts trying to figure this out!
 
If you want the status bar back, then gr8tfly has your solution.

Otherwise, consider getting the iStat Pro widget for your dashboard. It shows available hard drive space and lots of other useful information at a glance, such as temperatures, ram usage, and fan speed.
 
Why would my activity monitor > disk usage say 79 GB free and the status bar in Finder say 171 GB free? I believe the 171 to be correct but I can't figure out why there is a discrepancy.
 
cajunbob678 said:
Why would my activity monitor > disk usage say 79 GB free and the status bar in Finder say 171 GB free? I believe the 171 to be correct but I can't figure out why there is a discrepancy.
Click to expand...

Are you using a laptop? If so, it's probably Time Machine snapshots (which show as backups in "About This Mac") because they are temporary and won't impact your use of your free hard drive space.

You can delete them by turning off Time Machine in System Preferences or using a Terminal command.
 
I just use iStatPro on Dashboard. One quick swipe to the bottom left corner and instant HD info along with all other info. Don't even have to click anything or press any keys.
 
gr8tfly said:
Finder > View > Show Status Bar :)

(For what it's worth, I went nuts trying to reenable it myself.)
Click to expand...

Thanks for that! I also turned on the path bar. I know it wastes 2 lines of vertical real estate but I'm used to knowing how much space is free and where I am in the filesystem at all times.
 
Heh, I opened the Finder for the first time on Lion, noticed the bar was missing, and reflexively hit Cmd-/ to turn it back on. Hardly even remembered I'd done it till I saw this post. Easy fix, though I know most probably don't know keyboard shortcuts like that one.

jW
 
Clark Kent said:
Are you using a laptop? If so, it's probably Time Machine snapshots (which show as backups in "About This Mac") because they are temporary and won't impact your use of your free hard drive space.

You can delete them by turning off Time Machine in System Preferences or using a Terminal command.
Click to expand...

How are they temporary? Mine just keep growing and growing on my HD, even though I'm regularly connected to my Time Capsule. They eventually reached 20GB, so I turned off Time Capsule and rebooted, hoping that would free up the space. Instead, the 20GB just shifted over into the "Other" category and I still can't get rid of it.
 
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