Wrong free disk space

[goncalossilva]

Hello!

I was copying a bunch of files from an external HD (~100GB) when my MacBook Air hibernated. When I powered it back on, the copy failed because the HD had been ejected unsafely (damn, I should have checked the battery status).

I tried to copy everything again, but got an error about not having enough free space... so I moved everything I had copied so far to the trash and tried to erase it. It got stuck there, so I force quitted Finder and tried again. Nothing. Then I went with "rm -rf ~/.Trash/*". Nothing again. I decided to reboot the computer and try it again — it worked!

But now I have a problem. While Finder reports that I have 190GB of disk space left (this is correct!), Disk Utility says that I only have around 90GB... and when I try to copy my ~100GB of files Finder says that I don't have enough space left.

How can I fix this? These 100GB of missing space seems to be from the failed copy, but I don't know what to do.

Thanks!

PS. I'd "erase free space" on Disk Utility, but since this is an SSD with TRIM that option isn't available.

 

[goncalossilva]

So, I found the culprit: MobileBackups. TimeMachine was using 100GB+ on local backups (a new Lion "feature").

If anyone might come across a similar issue, you can disable local backups running "sudo tmutil disablelocal" from the Terminal.