Finder and Disk Utility showing inconsistent free space

Hi everyone,

Recently I've upgrade from SL to Lion on my MacBook Pro and I noticed that finder and Disk Utility are showing different amount of free space in my hard drive. Finder says that there's 129.16 GB free when I click on Get Info over my Macintosh HD, and Disk Utility shows 77.05 GB free. I've tried repairing disk permissions, repairing the disk and nothing changes.

I don't know if it has anything to do with the problem, but anyway, I had a BootCamp partition, but I erased it via Disk Utility and resized the Macintosh HD partition to fill the entire hard drive. The bootcamp partition was a NTFS partition, but I've formated it to HFS+ again, so it shouldn't affect anything.

I have no idea of what to do next. Any help here would be great!

Thanks in advance,

Caio

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 3, 2011 9:00 AM

21 replies

belms

Level 1

0 points

Nov 10, 2012 10:13 AM in response to SP Forsythe

Thanks, Turning Time Machine off (and a restart for good measure) and then back on again worked a treat.

NYCC4S

Level 1

8 points

Dec 4, 2012 7:22 PM in response to Liz M

OK, I actually have the reverse problem. Finder is showing more available space than my HD has capacity for!

I had the same problem as everyone else recently on my MB Air, but after several issues with the machine, Apple replaced it. Now I have this new problem. 500GB HD, and Finder is showing that I have 688 GB available!

Jadiem26

Level 1

0 points

Dec 31, 2012 7:29 AM in response to lisdavid89

"erasing free space" worked for me. I had 210 gb floating around out there. New ssd with mountain lion now. Well, with that space reclaimed lets see what it can do. Thnx for the tip.

Apr 10, 2013 8:46 PM in response to Caio92

Thanks. It solved my problem.

Jul 2, 2014 1:52 PM in response to Caio92

Response to an old thread here. Was having the same problem in 10.9 (Mavericks). Cleared out a TON of space in my hard drive. Finder recognized it, but Disk Utility (and consequently DaisyDisk) did not. Tried a Time Machine backup and no change. After the TM backup, I disabled TM, and lo, the Disk Utility free space numbers started climbing.

It's still not clear to me where the remaining usage is coming from. DaisyDisk is only showing files that total around 100GB, but usage is at 121GB. There's another user that could explain about 10GB, but that still leaves about 10GB unaccounted for.

For now, I have 133GB available, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. I just want to know if there's something eating up storage for no reason. Either way, thanks to this three year old thread for solving my problem.

Oct 29, 2014 11:49 AM in response to SP Forsythe

Thank you! I needed to restore iPhoto, and it said I didn't have enough space to. But according to the finder, I did. Turning off Time Machine then turning it back on fixed it for me so I could restore it.

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Finder and Disk Utility showing inconsistent free space