What shows correct storage available?

[Tom Schrier]

I am not sure how much storage is available on my iMac. (Yosemite 10.10.4)
About This Mac's "color bar" shows that apps use 125 GB, but says: 915,05 of 999,35 GB available.
In Disk utility it says: Capacity: 999,35 GB, Available: 915,03 GB, Used: 84,31 GB

So how much storage do I have left?

Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/8hhaX

 

[hiddenmarkov]

I have seen some disparities in the past like this. I tbh go into terminal and run the following command

df -h

its gives disk usage and the -h argument makes it human readable. I find it more reliable and familiar in that its the same command I run on my CLI only linux servers. How apple determines disk use I never grasped to generate the variances in the gui methods. With this command top line /dev/disk1 should be what the system thinks it has in simplest way possible.

 

[Tom Schrier]

I have seen some disparities in the past like this. I tbh go into terminal and run the following command

df -h

its gives disk usage and the -h argument makes it human readable. I find it more reliable and familiar in that its the same command I run on my CLI only linux servers. How apple determines disk use I never grasped to generate the variances in the gui methods. With this command top line /dev/disk1 should be what the system thinks it has in simplest way possible.

Thank you for the reply!
I ran the command in Terminal and got this. Can you please help me? I dont really understand what all of it means.

 

[LOLobo]

You have 78GB used on your main partition "/".

 

[aristobrat]

Personally, I'd just use what Disk Utility tells you. If "Macintosh HD" is visible in your Finder, you can right-click on that and "Get Info", and it should match Disk Utility's results.

The "About This Mac" color bar has shown inaccurate usage amounts (like for your Apps) for a lot of folks, so I'm not a big fan of recommending that method.

 

[Tom Schrier]

You have 78GB used on your main partition "/".

So I guess that my apps dont use 125GB. Should I be worried about my Mac not showing the correct info?

 

[aristobrat]

So I guess that my apps dont use 125GB. Should I be worried about my Mac not showing the correct info?

The "About This Mac" has always shown incorrect information on all of my Macs. I don't worry about it, I just don't use it. Be interesting to hear what other peoples experience with it has been!

 

[Tom Schrier]

Personally, I'd just use what Disk Utility tells you. If "Macintosh HD" is visible in your Finder, you can right-click on that and "Get Info", and it should match Disk Utility's results.

The "About This Mac" color bar has shown inaccurate usage amounts (like for your Apps) for a lot of folks, so I'm not a big fan of recommending that method.

Macintosh HD in Finder indeed shows 915GB left / 84 Gb used. that matches Disk Utility. From now I will use that to find out how much storage is left. Thank you!

 

[Weaselboy]

So I guess that my apps dont use 125GB. Should I be worried about my Mac not showing the correct info?

That storage readout is notoriously screwed up, particularly on Yosemite. It uses the Spotlight index for its data and that index becomes corrupt and the amounts are shown all wrong.

You can run the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight and that will correct it. But my experience is that over time it gets messed up again, so I just pay not attention to it.

sudo mdutil -E /