Hard drive free space discrepancy

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Hard drive free space discrepancy

I have an 11 inch Macbook Air with a 120GB SSD and I am running OS X Lion 10.7.5.

Every so often I get messages indicating my hard drive is nearly full. Since it is a small hard drive I never thought much of it and just deleted a movie or two I put on it for when I travel. But lately I realized that I keep all my music, photos, and bulk of my movie files on an external drive, so there really isn’t much on my computer.

When I add up all the files listed under My Mac HD in the finder, I get 62 GB. Add in the operating system and I come up with 75 GB of the SSD used. When I look at the storage summary on “About this Mac”, it says I am using 94 GB. There is about a 19 GB discrepancy. Does anyone know what could cause this and where 19 GB of data can be hiding?

Hard drive free space discrepancy

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Dec 21, 2012 7:42 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Dec 21, 2012 7:46 PM in response to OuterMarker

Use a tool like OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 to find what's on the disk, where, and how large.

Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive

1. See Lion's Storage Display.

2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.

3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.

4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.

5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.

6. See The Storage Display.

You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.

You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

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