Storage Space Discrepancy

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Level 1

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Storage Space Discrepancy

I have a new Macbook Air with Mountain Lion. Under Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info > Storage it shows how much space is used:

It says I have 10GB of movies but there is nothing in the movies folder. It also says I have 7GB of photos but I have hardly any pictures. The audio category shows 8.5GB of music, but my iTunes library only has 3GB of music files. Also, I'm wondering where the 15GB of "backup" files are stored. I have Time Machine set up with an external hard drive so I don't want that taking up space.

MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 24, 2012 9:09 PM

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Answer 1

JasonFear

Level 5

4,965 points

Nov 24, 2012 10:51 PM in response to ntelliott

I think the general consensus is that the representation break down on the storage allocation in About this Mac is not even close to being accurate. Furthermore the software's identification of "Movies" is not counting what's in your Movies folder but rather additional application support files and such. The good news, the value where it says 40.34 GB free of 120.47 GB is accurate.

If you're looking for an itemized break down of what's where, I'd recommend a 3rd party application. An example of a few are:

- Daisy Disk

- WhatSizeIsIt?

- Omni Disk Sweeper

- Disk Inventory X

All of them are free for the purposes of scanning and displaying results, a few of them require you to pay if you want to enable additional application functionality.

Here's a link to more information regarding local Time Machine snapshots - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

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