Inconsistent hard drive space reporting

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Level 1

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Inconsistent hard drive space reporting

I am having some problem with missing hard drive space. When I click "Get Info" on my boot drive, it is showing that I have used 89.6 GB. However, if I use "Get Info" on every items on my boot drive, they only add up to 60.8GB.

To further complicated the issue, when I use OmniDiskSweeper, it is showing that I have used 83.2GB but when I actually run the program, OmniDiskSweeper is telling me that I have used 62.4GB.

What's going on? Is there something wrong with my computer or my drive? Please help!!!

Mac Pro early 2009, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Dec 9, 2010 11:50 PM

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Answer 1

jsd2

Level 5

6,245 points

Dec 10, 2010 2:14 PM in response to wayneker

I would first run Disk Utility's Verify Disk, just to be sure there is no directory problem.

The most common cause of a situation where OmniDiskSweeper can't find the missing space is just that there are other user accounts that contain large amounts of data.

The system-supplied subfolders (Documents, Desktop, Music, etc) in a user's Home folder have restricted permissions, and can't be accessed by other users. They will be reported as size zero by Finder and by OmniDiskSweeper when measured by a different user, which will make the summary info incorrect as well.

If this is not your situation, there still might be other restricted folders whose contents you are not seeing as a normal admin user. To get around any permissions restrictions you would need to examine the HD using "root" privileges. There are a number of ways to do this, but assuming that OmniDiskSweeper is currently in your main /Applications folder, you could try the following:

Open the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities). Copy the following line and paste it directly into the Terminal window, then type Return:

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Enter your admin password when prompted (it will not echo on the screen), and type Return.

This should open OmniDiskSweeper's "Drive List" window. Click inside it and then sweep your HD as you did before. This time OmniDiskSweeper should run with "root" privileges - see what you get this way.

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Answer 2

KXsig

Level 2

310 points

Dec 11, 2010 5:01 PM in response to wayneker

Hi W,

I bump into this reports differences everyday, as we have HDD allocation units with 4KB - formatted as Mac OS Extended, Journaled. This prevents me to quickly compare my local and remote files on my FTP client app, remote items are reported in bytes and local items have the 4KB low limit.

For your question you also have to consider the locked or protected files that your applications can and can not read.

Take a look at these posts in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2527334 and in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2546228

Good luck.

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