MacBook M3 HD Storage: What Is "Users & Shared"

gimmiegolf wrote:

I have a new MacBook Air M3 running Sonoma 14.5. It has 16GB memory and 512GB storage. After migrating my files from my previous Intel 2013 MacBook Air running El Capitan 10.11.6, which had 256GB storage, I checked my storage and found that there was 450GB being used and only about 50 GB available. The list of what was being stored included photos, documents, system, etc., and an item listed as "Users and Shared" which was taking up 266.15GB of storage. I wanted to see what was in there but you can't open it up and there is no information I can find about what may be included and where on the HD it would be located. Any help is appreciated.

I never use that GUI interface...

I open it and shortly the User& Shared disappeared from my list...

Do you have "Sharing" turned on— I might suspect this is redundant storage(?)

>System Settings>Sharing

If you are unsure you can use the Terminal.app copy& paste:

sudo ** -gs /Users/YourUserNameHere/* | sort -k 1nr

replace "YourUserNameHere" with your user name

your psswd will not echo on screen type it in anyway to proceed use the enter\return key

It's Other Users & Shared. Other Users are other accounts on the Mac. If you go to /Users/, are there folders besides your home and Shared?

gimmiegolf wrote:

Attached are 3 screenshots showing memory usage. The last shows the explanation from Apple when clicking “?”. Not very helpful.

The GUI has never been a reliable and precise overview... pretty yes.

I do not put much faith in it.

Memory is RAM.

Storage is SSD

My "Other Users & Shared disappears," and "System Data" never resolves...ymmv

Lets see what the bigger picture looks like from Terminal.app copy & paste:

diskutil list internal