Where's my HDD space gone???

[Piplodocus]

Just trying to whittle down my 500GB HDD so it'll fit on a 256GB SSD.

iStat menus and Space Gremlin say I've only got it down to 292GB, but finder "Get Info" says it's 160GB on disk!

Where's the space gone? There's nothing in the trash? is it highly fragmented or is there something funny going on? +80% of what finder says is a fair bit out!!! It says current drive is 500.11GB and there's only the one Lion partition!

Which is right?

 

[Prodo123]

Time Machine local snapshots take up quite a lot of space.

 

[Piplodocus]

Couldn't seem to find it anywhere, or find these local snapshots (even by enabling Debug menu and hidden partitions in Disk Utility). Finally found the new "About this Mac" storage tab shows them clear as day though. My missing 120GB!

Can I turn off or clear local backups? Is it a good idea if you had an SSD?

 

[dusk007]

What is the point of a local backup anyway. If the drive fails the backup is gone too. I wouldn't even think about something this ridiculous. Even if you just need it as a sort of Versioning tool I wouldn't say it is worth the space it needs.

Why don't you try some diskanalyzing tool. They are very good at showing you where you space is wasted. DaisyDisk in trial will at least let you analyze one partition and it shows you everything.

 

[fat jez]

time machine local snapshots are only used if you aren't connected to a time capsule. Yes, you can turn them off (I have, as my data doesn't change often enough between being attached to my home network to give me any concerns). A sudo tmutil disablelocal in a terminal window will disable them. It's a nice idea, would have been good if Apple made this feature more obvious and easier to disable.

There is a lot happening under the hood in Lion that needs tinkering in terminal to disable. Fine if you're a power user, but for Joe Average it probably causes a lot of confusion.

 

[Piplodocus]

Hmmm... might disable it then.

I glad Apple don't fill OSX with a million and one preferences for every little detail, but equally they seem to be too far the other way. I'm not an idiot, and this is supposed to be a computer, not just a phone or handy internet browsing contraption. A few extra preferences wouldn't exactly ruin the OS now would it? (including a button to turn on the old easy to recognise coloured Finder icons)