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Howard2k

macrumors 603
Original poster
Mar 10, 2016
6,455
6,898
I have an USB3 drive I use for backups. It has two folders, one is 80GB and one is 450GB. It's a 1TB drive with 150GB free.

I don't have a Ph.D in mathematics, but I'm pretty sure that's not quite correct.

Ran First Aid, all good. Disk Utility still shows 150GBs free.

I used the command-option-period trick and there are a bunch if hidden folders for spotlight indexing, trash etc. There is perhaps 2GB of storage space being used by Spotlight (but of a surprise) but nothing that would account for any significant amount of my missing storage.

Any ideas? Disk Utility shows it's in good shape but I can't find where the storage is being used.
 
Run this command in Terminal with the drive attached. It will show all the base folders size in GB, including any system or hidden folders that might be on there to help you sort this out.

Just substitute the drive name for drivename in my example. Give it a minute or so to complete.

Code:
sudo du -hs /Volumes/drivename
 
Thanks! It didn't show any details though. Just "791G".

Screen Shot 2016-12-03 at 4.50.20 PM.png
 
try

du -hd1


Thanks.

This is strange...

Screen Shot 2016-12-03 at 5.23.00 PM.png


365GB reported through du but Finder reports 83GB.

Screen Shot 2016-12-03 at 5.26.27 PM.png

It accounts for the discrepancy but how can I resolve the issue?

If it helps, I believe the issue is that I tried to have the NAS copy some >4GB files to the drive (FAT32). So it's taken up the marked the space but the files don't "exist".

But again, Disk Admin thinks that everything is ok.
 
what is inside that folder? if it has folders you can run the same command until you narrow it down.
 
Thanks. the folder that contained the large files is already gone. It's just orphaned the space.

I think I can fix it by running a check disk from the NAS but I'm interested if there's a way to fix it in OS X.
 
not sure I follow. did u remove the folder already with 'rm -rf' ?


No, I removed it through finder a week or so ago. Just thinking back to the issue, that's almost certainly it. There was a subfolder that contained the offending files but it's already gone, it's just that the FAT is probably messed up.


Is there a cli check disk type utility?
 
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