Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Upgrade or clean install? I did a clean and gained 20GB. The recovery partition is <1GB AFAIK
 
Recovery is 650MB. Funny you say this, because an upgrade install from Yosemite to El Capitan needed me about 5GB more free space even after running a couple days now.

You might try running the command below in Terminal and that will show all the base folders and the size of each in GB. May help you pinpoint the issue.

Code:
sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /
 
Thats odd. And i could be crazy but I looked at my space after install and I could have sworn I had more. But don't hold me to that. I could be wrong. Either way I didn't lose any.
 
I'm noticing the same.

Stupid question, but..... Is going into Disk Utility, wiping the drive and then reinstalling OS X from recovery the same thing as a clean install? (Downloading the installer, etc. making a bootable usb, etc. is such a chore.)

I notice right now after wiping and reinstalling, disk utility says I have 3.07 GB free space. I have nothing installed on the computer. I have a fusion drive with a total size of 3.12 GB.

On Yosemite and Mavericks, I would generally have 3.08 GB free space. That was after installing photoshop, auto cad, Sketchup, etc. Something seems off.
 
Yep... exact same end result.

Thanks! Seems odd that without anything installed that the system is using 50gb though. Perhaps my math is wrong.


** Edit- I just did a clean install on my drive via USB and it freed back up the space for me.

I went from 3.07 before to back up to 3.09 free.
 
Last edited:
I have five SSDs with that are basically the same (Same information and applications) except for the OS. Two have El Cap, two have Yosemite, and one has Mavericks.

Both the El Cap disks use about 12GB more space then the Yosemite disks.

The Yosemite disk consumes about 13GB more space than the Maverick Disk.

Lou
 
What could do this?

I already redeleted the sleep image and made the file unmutteble

How big is the recovery partition?



Look in /Library/SystemMigration/History/Migration*/ there could be a tonne of crap in there.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.