Finder disc space doesn't add up

Question

Finder disc space doesn't add up

Finder reports 431 GB used and 68.2 GB free

But the sum of the folders in the root directory adds up to only 245 GB. That's a difference of 186 GB.

Could there be very large files or folders in the root directory that are hidden from Finder?

Mac Pro 3.2 GHz, 6 GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.6.6), iMac 2 GHz , 2 GB RAM

Posted on Feb 18, 2011 7:08 AM

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Answer 1

macjack

Level 10

111,242 points

Feb 18, 2011 7:26 AM in response to marine_microbe

WhatSize or Omni DiskSweeper will both show you what's hogging your disk space.

Whatever it is you need to delete it because you are running low on free disk space. As a rule of thumb you should have no less than 15% disk space for the OS to run effectively.

-mj

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Answer 2

BobHarris

Level 9

57,173 points

Feb 18, 2011 7:28 AM in response to marine_microbe

Yes. /private which includes things like your swapfiles and your sleepimage which can be very large. There are other operating system specific directories that are not shown in the Finder to keep the general user from deleting or messing with these hidden files and thus messing up their Mac.

Try using a utility such as OmniDiskSweeper (free)
<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7402/omnidisksweeper>

Just do NOT delete anything you do not understand.

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