Understanding disk usage?

Discussion in 'macOS' started by pazreal, Jan 2, 2008.

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  1. pazreal, Jan 2, 2008

    pazreal macrumors regular

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    Location:
    Salt Lake City, UT
    #1
    A friend asked me to try to figure out why her MBP hard drive is nearly full. I went ahead and found the file sizes for the major folders that I could think of and had the following results:

    Applications- 5.1 GB
    Library- 11.1 GB
    Music- 47GB
    Photos- 8.2GB
    Movies- 1GB

    That all made sense... however the HD was still showing that she only had 20GB remaining on her 120GB drive. Then I noticed that the Users folder rang in at 63GB. The contents of the folder are basically the above mentioned folders (The sum of Music, Photos, Movies is 56GB). It almost seems as if it is counting them twice. Is that the case? It seems to me that between the user folder and the content folders that is the whole drive less 20GB, how can that be?

    Has anyone else noticed this and if yes do you have any suggestions as to how to reclaim the disk space?

    Thanks.
     
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  2. Eidorian, Jan 2, 2008

    Eidorian macrumors Penryn

    Eidorian

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    Location:
    Indianapolis
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  3. Makosuke, Jan 3, 2008

    Makosuke macrumors 603

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    Aug 15, 2001
    Location:
    The Cool Part of CA, USA
    #3
    The tool Eidorian mentioned isn't bad, but there are two other things you might note:

    1) If there are other users on the computer, doing a "get info" on the Users folder won't show you data owned by them if your current user doesn't have permissions to access those files--Finder (appropriately) only gives you stats on stuff you have permission to see. So if there's another user with, say, 20GB of junk in their movies folder, that would account for it.

    2) If you aren't already taking this into account, don't forget the GiB/GB (OS/HD Manufacturer) difference, which means that that 120GB disk really only holds about 112GB (more accurately, 112GiB) according to the OS. That 8GB wouldn't account for the big difference you're seeing, though, so there's still something else you're overlooking.
     
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