New Macbook Pro and Catalina - 650GB of mystery disk space missing.

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I bought a new Macbook pro with Catalina installed.

I didn't use migration assistant, but transferred all my files from my old Mac and installed the software from scratch.

Both the old and new Mac have 2TB SSD drives and essentially, the exact same data and applications on them.

However, the old Mac has 1.2 TB free, whereas the new Mac only has about 800GB free (it had even less, but I deleted about 200gb of stuff I didn't need).

When I check 'Storage', it tells me that there is about 680GB of 'other' being used.

Anyone know what I can do about reclaiming this lost disk space? I've searched for invisible and visible files over 500MB and nothing odd was found.

Thanks for any help.

 

[gilby101]

Use DaisyDisk (fast & pretty) or OmniDiskSweeper (free and less complete) to see what is really on your disk with results structured by Folder and not by some mythical kind of file.

Most likely (assuming you have emptied Trash) is that the deleted content are still in snapshot folders or other 'purguable' storage. Reboot, waiting a day or so, or setting up your Time Machine backup may clear some of this. Also ignoring the issue can be the correct thing, leaving macOS to release that space when you need it!

It is normal to have say 50GB of Other (my iMac has 61GB right now). DaisyDisk shows that 20Gb of this is either purgeable or snapshots. The rest, I don't worry about.

PS. Good move to just transfer files and reinstall apps. Gets rid of a lot of rubbish which may have accumulated.