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Storage

My documents folder takes up 21gb but only has ~3gb of files visible. What is going on? Also, my other folder takes up 27gb and I can't access it at all? What is this nonsense.

MacBook Pro 13″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jan 26, 2021 1:07 PM

Top-ranking reply

Camelot

Level 9

55,413 points

Posted on Jan 26, 2021 1:17 PM

Where are you seeing these numbers?

If you're looking at About This Mac -> Storage, then you should realize that the numbers represent the amount of disk space used by certain classes of files, not just the contents of your Documents folder.

For example, a word document, or a PDF, or image file, or a disk image in your Downloads folder would all be classed as a 'Document' for purposes of About This Mac, because it is a document file, regardless of its location.

You can use About This Mac -> Storage -> Manage... to have the OS identify your 'Documents' data, and it will automatically identify large files that you might want to offload to free up space.

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Storage

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