200GB of “Hidden” Files
I just completed migrating my wife’s old iMac to a new M1 Mac Mini. Migration went fine with Migration Assistant, however, I uncovered a problem that I’ve now been researching for several days, including one call to Apple Support.
In a nutshell I seem to have around 200GB of storage taken up by something that I can’t locate. The screen capture from the original iMac shows the issue. All the files in the 5 main folders on the drive add up to roughly 100 GB. But if you look at the disk storage used, it’s about 300 GB, which leaves around 200 GB used by something. This end up migrating over to the new Mac mini and I’d really like to free this space up.
I know there are hidden files so there probably is maybe 10 to 15 GB not accounted for, but not double what’s shown in the directories in Finder.
The only thing I’ve seen to resolve this is the nuclear option of erasing the drive and reinstalling everything from either time machine back up or manually. I saw one post in this forum (2018) that was pretty close to the same problem and their solution was to erase and restore from time machine. Any ideas what this possibly could be? And better yet how to fix it.
Mac mini 2018 or later