Partition size shown is incorrect

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Level 1

8 points

Partition size shown is incorrect

I wanted to use the bootcamp assistant (first time) and noticed that right at the start where there's a slider that allows you to choose your bootcamp/macOS partition size, it shows wrong numbers.

Storage managment says I have 187 Gigabytes free to use, but the bootcamp assistant only shows 120 Giga available for the macOS partition, and 48 Giga for the Bootcamp partition (the default). So there's about 20 Giga missing. I quit the bootcamp assistant and searched for a bit, cleaned my disk a little and tries again, and noticed that this time it only shows 116 giga available for the macOS partition, while I still have close to 200 gigs available according to Storage Manager.

I quit again and decided not to do it.... but today I tried again, and now it only shows 108 gigs available, while I still have almost 200 gigs available via Storage Manager:

Last thing that might be connected to this issue, is that my "Documents" tab shows a size of 61.5 gigs, while the file browser only shows 33 gigs in "Documents" (red circle). Same thing happens with the Photos app and "Pictures" folder (purple circle):

Any ideas? What should I do?

Thanks.

MacBook Pro 15”, macOS 10.14

Posted on Apr 14, 2019 6:58 AM

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Answer 1

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Apr 15, 2019 4:40 AM in response to Shahafher

You are on High Sierra (or Mojave). This looks clean.

Can you post the output of

diskutil apfs list

df -h

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Answer 2

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Apr 15, 2019 3:35 AM in response to Shahafher

Shahafher wrote:

I did some more research on my folders and got the conclusion that there are ~29 gigs that I'm missing for some reason.

It is very unlikely that you are 'missing' disk space.

As shown in the second picture above, "Documents" tab shows 61 gigs while the Documents folder shows only 33 gigs. After deleting some junk from the documents folder the numbers decreased, but keeping the 29 gigs difference.

In most cases, the differences are due to tools calculating disk space differently.

In bootcamp assistant I've notinced that if I add up this partition sizes, I get exactly 29 gigs less than what I expect.

BCA relies on the disk partitions and APFS or CS information.

This makes me think that there are 29 gigs of data somewhere on my machine that I somehow miss.

Any ideas why the difference?

Can you post the output of

diskutil list

from macOS Terminal?

Also, what do you mean by "Spotlight indexing"? why is it not reliable?

See Use Spotlight on your Mac - Apple Support for reference.

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Answer 3

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Apr 14, 2019 7:10 AM in response to Shahafher

Storage Manager relies on Spotlight indexing, and should not be used for anything else related to Bootcamp. BC Assistant is much more reliable.

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Answer 4

Shahafher Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 15, 2019 12:54 AM in response to Loner T

Thanks for your reply.

I did some more research on my folders and got the conclusion that there are ~29 gigs that I'm missing for some reason.

As shown in the second picture above, "Documents" tab shows 61 gigs while the Documents folder shows only 33 gigs.

After deleting some junk from the documents folder the numbers decreased, but keeping the 29 gigs difference.

In bootcamp assistant I've notinced that if I add up this partition sizes, I get exactly 29 gigs less than what I expect.

This makes me think that there are 29 gigs of data somewhere on my machine that I somehow miss.

Any ideas why the difference?

Also, what do you mean by "Spotlight indexing"? why is it not reliable?

Thank you very much

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Answer 5

Shahafher Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 15, 2019 4:08 AM in response to Loner T

here's the diskutil list output:

I really don't understand any of it.

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Partition size shown is incorrect

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