Understanding disk usage?

[pazreal]

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.

 

[Eidorian]

http://www.derlien.com/

Don't forget about all the "hidden" folders.

 

[Makosuke]

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.