System takes up 83 GB of space

Storage on my MacBook Air 11 2011 fulled up, so I moved all the music from iTunes Media/Music to an external hard drive and then deleted it from the internal 128GB SSD. After finishing work with the files I needed the space for, I tried to move all my music back (about 50GB), but it happened, that i had only 30GB left, and I can't indeed move it back. Storage report @ About This Mac | Storage says that system takes up 83GB of space, which before was around 30GB. OmniDiskSweeper on the other hand sees only about 30 GB of taken up space, which is more like true. All the measures to find out what exactly takes up so much space have failed, and to note all the files and apps that I worked with after deleting the music I have also deleted and now rebooted the MacBook a couple of times, things don't change. And, sadly, Dr. Cleaner is not available to download from Mac App Store in my country (Russia). Any possible help from you guys? I work as a DJ, as you probably can tell from my nickname, and I sort of need my music back.

MacBook Air

Posted on Jan 15, 2019 11:16 AM

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Jan 15, 2019 12:30 PM in response to djdemetro

Apple's storage report is unreliable. OmniDiskSweeper checks for all the space it can find on your account. Do you have other accounts on your machine? Look there too. So, I don't know if the Users folder counts the space of all the other users or not 😒.


for the real and total story, I'd only trust a terminal command.

/Applications/Utilities/terminal


See how much space is used on your startup drive, "Macintosh HD", use the df command. Type in

df -h

then press return.



You startup drive should appear first. It's the one called / in the Mounted on column. Ignore the rest.


size of startup drive is 930G. The space used up on the startup drive is 601G. The free space is 329G.


At least this should give you what number to believe. There are more terminal commands, but I'll stop here.


overview of terminal commands.

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-11071



If the numbers are off, I'd say run disk utility and see if it finds any problems.


R




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System takes up 83 GB of space

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