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DanielR1

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 15, 2015
2
0
I was checking how much storage was left in my hard drive, but I noticed something strange. One month ago it said that I used up 250 GB in total. This time it said I used up 720 GB in total. However, when I added up the memory of all the folders inside Macintosh HD, it only added up to about 250 GB. Where are the other 470 invisible GB and how do I find and delete them?
 
I was checking how much storage was left in my hard drive, but I noticed something strange. One month ago it said that I used up 250 GB in total. This time it said I used up 720 GB in total. However, when I added up the memory of all the folders inside Macintosh HD, it only added up to about 250 GB. Where are the other 470 invisible GB and how do I find and delete them?

It's possible you may have minor corruption of file system catalog. Try running "verify disk" with Disk Utility to see if anything out of the ordinary is reported.
 
I was checking how much storage was left in my hard drive, but I noticed something strange. One month ago it said that I used up 250 GB in total. This time it said I used up 720 GB in total. However, when I added up the memory of all the folders inside Macintosh HD, it only added up to about 250 GB. Where are the other 470 invisible GB and how do I find and delete them?

What does the Storage tab of the About This Mac show? Is your computer a MacBook/Pro? It's possible that you have some your storage consumed with local backups - especially of you are not doing frequent TM backups.

You can disable the local backup with the following Terminal command:
Code:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
 
I was checking how much storage was left in my hard drive, but I noticed something strange. One month ago it said that I used up 250 GB in total. This time it said I used up 720 GB in total. However, when I added up the memory of all the folders inside Macintosh HD, it only added up to about 250 GB. Where are the other 470 invisible GB and how do I find and delete them?
If you have Time Machine turned on, it stores all deleted filed in a hidden /.MobileBackups folder and that space is not shown in Finder. You can read about it here. You can just ignore it as the OS will start deleting those files as the disk begins to get full.

Run the command below in Terminal and it will show how much is in that folder.

Code:
sudo du -hs /.MobileBackups
 
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