Hard drive available space shown incorrectly in finder

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Hard drive available space shown incorrectly in finder

Hi,

I noticed that my Finder status bar shows incorrect amount of available space. Actually the amount of available space is larger that the actual disk size. The same problem is experienced if I click "Get Info" on my Macintosh HD. It also shows drive capacity as 249.82GB and Available as 252.7GB.

All the other tools, for example Disk Utility and About this Mac/Storage show the correct information, which is that I have 115.46GB of free space on my Macintosh HD.

Any idea what could cause this? Or has anyone else experienced similar problems?

Oh, and I have Filevault 2 turned on.

//ilari

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Oct 23, 2011 1:04 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 23, 2011 1:40 AM in response to ilari Korte

Available, i.e., the total storage of your disk.

Drive capacity: the amount available for store and write, excluded other space, used for software at low-level (i.e. Recovery Disk), which you can access to restarting with Command-R).

Free space: the space available to write into your disk and store your files before it becomes full.

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Answer 2

ilari Korte Author

Level 1

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Oct 24, 2011 4:29 AM in response to ilari Korte

Maybe I should be a bit more specific:

Currently the Get Info for Macintosh HD shows the following:

Capacity: 249.82 GB

Available: 282.69 GB

Used: -- bytes (-- KB on disk)

While for example df -k shows the following (which is accurate):

$ df -k

Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on

/dev/disk1 243966468 152025216 91685252 63% /

devfs 181 181 0 100% /dev

map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net

map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home

localhost:/ezioMnNoyRVU8Vj-YxC4cJ 243966468 243966468 0 100% /Volumes/MobileBackups

No matter which way you look at it, the Finder currently calculates the available (free) space incorrectly.

//ilari

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Answer 3

zchrykng

Level 1

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Jan 12, 2012 7:35 PM in response to ilari Korte

This is probably like the issue that I was having on my MacBook Pro. If you are using Time Machine on a laptop it stores the diffs in a file on your hard drive. This action can be disabled with the terminal command

sudo tmutil disablelocal

This turns the local Time Machine off. It is up to you if you want to do this, but Finder shows this space as unused since it can be overwritten when needed. It saved me over a hundred GBs of space.

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