Discrepancy between Disk Utility and About This Mac

Question

Lurkums Author

Level 4

1,514 points

Discrepancy between Disk Utility and About This Mac

I have just deleted a copy of my Photos Library from my internal hard drive. It was some 144GB.

I have emptied Trash. The emptying has concluded. My trash is empty.

I checked the space on my internal drive, thus:

That shows the disk utilisation as it was prior to the deletion and the emptying of the trash.

I then compared a snapshot of the disk with Disk Utility and also "About This Mac"

They differ from each other, though Disk Utility agrees with the Info panel

Quitting and relaunching Disk Utility has not yet made any difference

I would love to have my perplexity resolved, please

Catalina 10.15 (19A602)

MacBook Pro 13”, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 26, 2019 3:44 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Lurkums Author

Level 4

1,514 points

Oct 26, 2019 3:49 AM in response to Brallen01

One might think that Disk Utility is more accurate, as did I, but the disk as shown by Disk Utility has had 144GB of files deleted from it and the trash has been emptied.

The result in About This Mac is the disk utilisation I expect.

Reply

Answer 2

Lurkums Author

Level 4

1,514 points

Oct 26, 2019 3:55 AM in response to Brallen01

I have a copy task that has a further 10 hours to run before I can reboot. Indeed, my instinct has been to reboot to see what the picture is after that. But my other instinct is that Disk Utility is normally a highly accurate indicator. Unless, of course, someone knows differently

The photos library is not a single file, of course, but a whole slew of files in a file package

Reply

Answer 3

Brallen01

Level 2

305 points

Oct 26, 2019 3:59 AM in response to Lurkums

Sure thing, I'd give it time as there's thousands upon thousands of scripts and tasks that run in macOS and one of them will be to update your utilisation within disk utility.

if you right click on your disk and select get info - does that marry up to the "about me" section or disk utility?

if it marries up to the smaller "about me" which you state is correct, disk utility at some point will be updated.

Reply

Answer 4

Brallen01

Level 2

305 points

Oct 26, 2019 4:26 AM in response to Lurkums

I am convinced if you leave it for a while - an hour or so or after you have restarted they will all be in sync, it is quite a hefty amount of data you have deleted in one chunk, it have had this before where things take time to refresh themselves.

Reply

Answer 5

Nov 20, 2019 6:50 AM in response to Lurkums

I have this problem all the time (The available disk space stays the same even though I have just deleted tons of huge files) and found a fix that works for me. I tried restarting, restarting is safe mode and running disk utility, re indexing the spotlight thing and none of it worked until I stumbled across the technique in another forum:

1 - Under the Apple manu go to "About this Mac"

2 - Toggle over to the "Storage" tab

3 - Wait 30 seconds.

It will autorefresh the 'snapshot' and free up the storage from the deleted files.

Reply

Answer 6

Lurkums Author

Level 4

1,514 points

Nov 20, 2019 6:52 AM in response to daveybuooy

daveybuooy wrote:

I have this problem all the time (The available disk space stays the same even though I have just deleted tons of huge files) and found a fix that works for me. I tried restarting, restarting is safe mode and running disk utility, re indexing the spotlight thing and none of it worked until I stumbled across the technique in another forum: