Missing Hard Drive space

[Mr. Brownstone]

I noticed recently that I was down to 12GB left on my hard drive, when its normally around 20-30GB. I did a few searches about missing hard drive space and found a few utilities to show me what was using the space. One of the more common things that came up in my search was .MobileBackups, but I don't use Time Machine and that folder shows up as 0KB on all the disk inventory programs I ran.

But one problem that did come up was the Disk Inventory X and the other one I used (I think it had "omni" in it) are showing the hard drive as having less capacity than it should.

As this image shows, the Mac partition should have a capacity of 136GB:

While Disk Inventory and the other program showed it at 127GB:

But not only that...it says that 114GB have been used, but then when I actually open the volume, it only accounts for 93GB:

So there's unaccounted for space in a couple different areas it seems. If 93GB is used then there should be 43GB free. Then there's the question of the 9GB missing between the capacity reported by Disk Inventory. As well as the fact that according to the Mac storage breakdown, 122GB is in use, not 93.

As an aside, I recently got an iPad, but I checked the backup folders for all of my iOS devices and the folder is only a couple of hundred MB, but maybe there's something else related to that that I don't know about that would explain it. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Chigz05]

I'm having a similar problem. Please let me know if you found a solution?

 

[Macman45]

A few things, but this is often caused by Time Machine which keeps local snapshots of your system daily.

What are you using attached to your Mac?

 

[Chigz05]

A few things, but this is often caused by Time Machine which keeps local snapshots of your system daily.

What are you using attached to your Mac?

I have local snapshots turned off as I have an SSD - any other ideas? From my own research I've checked the Spotlight folder and am in the middle of deleting and reindexing but it doesn't seem to have had any impact on the free space of the drive.

I've also attached a screenshot of Whatsize reporting the discrepancy in size - approx 18gb missing as 105gb used including hidden files and the used report being 123gb.

 

[Macman45]

I have local snapshots turned off as I have an SSD - any other ideas? From my own research I've checked the Spotlight folder and am in the middle of deleting and reindexing but it doesn't seem to have had any impact on the free space of the drive.

I've also attached a screenshot of Whatsize reporting the discrepancy in size - approx 18gb missing as 105gb used including hidden files and the used report being 123gb.

You can turn indexing off, but your real issue would seem to be lack of space. A cheap usb HDD maybe?

 

[Chigz05]

Yeah I've gone down that route, I have plenty of USB hard drives and also a networked drive for Media and TM Backups on an Airport Extreme.

I'm mostly concerned about day to day activity on the MBP so am looking at 64gb SDs as they're becoming reasonably priced these days.

My main problems would be solved if I could account for this missing 18gb though.. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Mr. Brownstone]

A few things, but this is often caused by Time Machine which keeps local snapshots of your system daily.

What are you using attached to your Mac?

I don't use Time Machine or have anything attached to my Mac.

Luckily I have enough room that it's not an imminent problem, but it's still frustrating to have such large amounts of space unaccounted for.

 

[cra19]

Could some of the missing space be your swapfile?

Just a thought. The OS uses some of your hard drive space for virtual memory, or the swapfile. I don't know how much space this file would use.

One other thing that could explain some differences is that Snow Leopard uses base 10, not base 8 when counting space - 1000mb = 1gb, not 1024mb as we used to count it once.

 

[ccw18]

Hardrive space found!

I had the same problem as OP. I had used OmniDisk Sweeper as well as Disk Inventory X and could still not find the discrepancy of a missing 73G. This problem first started after I upgraded my hardrive. I followed the directions in this article:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space/

Launched OmniDisk Sweeper under admin, and found the missing hard drive space. Apparently, there was an old user profile that contained a full iTunes library in it. Hit delete, and Hello missing 73G! Hope this helps.

Good Luck!

 

[macbookpro90]

lots missing...

I am having the same problem. I have gone through both visible and invisible files in Finder and I can only account for the space taken by music,video,applications photos etc., which is well under 25gb. But the real problem is that my HD is 500gb big, and the "other" files are taking up 419.04gb and seems to be growing daily. Could this possibly be registry files of some kind?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

I am having the same problem. I have gone through both visible and invisible files in Finder and I can only account for the space taken by music,video,applications photos etc., which is well under 25gb. But the real problem is that my HD is 500gb big, and the "other" files are taking up 419.04gb and seems to be growing daily. Could this possibly be registry files of some kind?

Mac OS X does not have any kind of Registry System like Windows.

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating up my space? by theSeb

To find out, where you hard drive capacity is being used, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

 

[jjames1000000]

How do you put your images within your post, rather than having them attach at the end?

 

[jjames1000000]

I had the same problem as OP. I had used OmniDisk Sweeper as well as Disk Inventory X and could still not find the discrepancy of a missing 73G. This problem first started after I upgraded my hardrive. I followed the directions in this article:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_recover_missing_hard_drive_space/

Launched OmniDisk Sweeper under admin, and found the missing hard drive space. Apparently, there was an old user profile that contained a full iTunes library in it. Hit delete, and Hello missing 73G! Hope this helps.

Good Luck!

When I do this, I get the warning:
"OCCCrashCatcher: Not enabling crash catching since we're connected to a tty (and this presumably in gdb)"
Do you know what this means?

I've started my own thread on this topic, can you please have a look and see if you've got any ideas:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16337986#post16337986

Thanks