I am running a 2011 Macbook Pro. I have 8 gigs of ram, 256gb SSD and 500GB HD. My SSD (main hard drive) was starting to get pretty full. I deleted over 100 GB of apps and other random stuff. I followed that up with a shut down and restart. Then repaired permissions. At this point I should have at least 150GB free on this drive, however disk utility is still showing that I only have 50GB. What can I do to recover this space and have it show up properly?
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Need Help with free space not showing correctly
- Thread starter parmacrafter
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I had a similar problem with my 15" rMBP. "Get Info" on the system drive showed 20GB more space used than the size of all the top level folders. I did a "Verify Disk" in Disk Utility. It told me there were problems and that I needed to do a "Repair Disk" after rebooting from the recovery partition (or an installation disk). I did that and now I'm down to a mere 10GB of missing disk space on my SSD. 
I think my problem is directly related to my iTunes Library. I have added a lot of movies over time. My library was just shy of 90gb. I moved my library to my 2nd hard drive and told iTunes where to go from there. There were no issues and everything in my library is functioning just fine. I then deleted all of the original library content from my main drive and emptied the trash. That should have cleared up at least 80gb. However, it didn't clear any space at all. I ran a Verify disk and it found a few problems. I then ran disk repair to fix those. Everything is running fine, but I am still missing that 80GB of space.
Do you have AppleCare coverage? Have you tried calling Apple for help? If that doesn't work out, I suppose a brute force fix would be to clone your SSD to an external drive, reformat the SSD and copy the clone back over. I'm pretty sure that this would fix my problem since I have a clone backup image and it is the correct size.
I don't have Apple Care. I just ran a Time Machine Backup. My hope was that it would be the right size. I would have no problem erasing the drive and just using Time Machine to put it back. Problem is that the Time Machine backup is the exact same size. My SSD is 256GB. I moved 88GB of Itunes Library. I then deleted the original library files. That should have freed up at least 80GB. I even went back and looked to make sure that the library files didn't somehow put themselves back. No luck.
Finally fixed!
I decided on the off chance that it would work to try a Carbon Copy Clone. I installed the program and ran a full clone. Then booted to the clone to put it all back. It took about 2 hours but it's all done and everything is exactly as I left it. The free space problem is also fixed.
Prior to re-doing it free space was showing as 50.3GB. After the clone got put back the free space is now showing as 169.8GB. That is more like it.
I decided on the off chance that it would work to try a Carbon Copy Clone. I installed the program and ran a full clone. Then booted to the clone to put it all back. It took about 2 hours but it's all done and everything is exactly as I left it. The free space problem is also fixed.
Prior to re-doing it free space was showing as 50.3GB. After the clone got put back the free space is now showing as 169.8GB. That is more like it.