iStat Vs finder

[blingboy2win]

I need to know what my HDD available space is, when i look at iStat is says "40.5 GB free" but when i look at get info in finder it says "101.4 GB free." Which one is right?

im running lion on a 13" mac book pro mid- 2010 model, 150GB HD

 

[S.B.G]

Can you post some screen shots of them? Either way, I'd believe Get Info first before iStat. But get another program to see what it says like Daisy Disk.

 

[Ivan P]

It'll more than likely be the saved backups for Time Machine. Something that Lion introduced was saving its' own backups to your main hard drive, which would then be transferred to your backup disk when it's connected. These backups are automatically deleted if hard drive space gets too low, and I've noticed that Finder reports the disk space as if the backups are not there (as it's all a "background" thing), while iStat doesn't know any better and will report disk space as including these backup files.

Best way to tell is clicking on the Apple in the top left, then select "About This Mac", then "More Info", then "Storage". I wouldn't be surprised if there is about 60GB showing under "Backups".

 

[martyr]

Old post but is relevant in High Sierra. After going down some pretty deep rabbit holes I discovered that Time Machine was making local snapshots. There's no way to turn them off (it appears) in macOS High Sierra, but you can thin them out yourself with the following command:

tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 10000000000

Here's my post that explores it further: https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...-snapshots-on-macos-high-sierra/309144#309144