Missing Hard Drive Space

[bdphifer]

Was cleaning out my main HDD the other day, and was looking at the storage tab in System Information. It shows ~100g of space taken up by 'movies.' There shouldn't be that much if any movies on the main HDD, as I have moved the media files to an external drive. Also the System Information shows 210g being used, and the Finder lists 131g free (I have a 50g Yosemite beta partition).

The problem is that if you add up the totals of the very large folders, showing hidden files, I can only calculate ~105 being used. Hence the mysterious movie files! When I use finder to locate the video files, using Kind, there is a small amount of video files; understandable, but not 100G.

I chatted with Apple today, and was disconnected when being moved up to a senior, but they didn't seem to have an easy answer. I ran out of time waiting for them, so I didn't rush to reconnect. I may try tomorrow over the phone.

My questions...if I initialize the HDD, and reinstall OS X with Time Machine, would it solve this problem?

If I wait until later this week and install Yosemite do I do a similar procedure, resulting in what I'm looking for?

TIA!

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space​

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
• For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo tmutil disablelocal.
  About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs​
• Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
• Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
  
• Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
• Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
• Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

• Encrypted drive
• Time Machine backup files and needed disk repair
• App filling log file
• App or file was 89GB
• Drive needed to be re-indexed
• Time Machine backup file
• Large app cache file
• Garageband files and video podcasts
• Oversized email being duplicated
• Another email issue
• 18.45EB of movies shown
• Duplicate movies in iPhoto app

Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X

 

[bdphifer]

Update

Thanks GGJStudios!

I read elsewhere on MacRumors about reindexing Spotlight, tried that last night to no avail.

Ran OmniDisk this morning with the results below. The Drive list has 316g used and the Sweep list has 149g used.

The second pic is the System Information data for my Macintosh HD.

Based on the OmniDisk data seems that there is something 'hiding' in the drive. May not be the right term, but there something between the two parts of that data.

Any thoughts?