Mac HD free space not updating

About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

How are you reading the available space?

To locate large files, you can use Spotlight as described here. That method may not find large folders that contain a lot of small files.

You can also use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. You can delete files with it, but don't do that unless you're sure that you know what you're deleting and that all data is safely backed up. That means you have multiple backups, not just one.

Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved.

ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.

Back up all data now.

Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual.

Triple-click the line of text below to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste (command-V) into the Terminal window. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.

I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means.

When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Does the available space reported in the Finder Info window change?

I am having this same issue. I used omni and deleted about 50gb of files on my 2012 13 MBA and the free space in disk utility is not increasing. In the storage screen on the about this Mac app the data I delete went from other to backups but the data is no longer in the locations it was. And omni now doesn't see it. When I click on the Macintosh hdd and look in it in finder it shows all the free space it should have but when I get I for on the hd it shows the old free space numbers. Will this resolve on its own? Is there something I need to do? Did ou stash these files somewhere where i can't find them?

I am having the same issue, I deleted the files and emptied the trash can, yet my space won't restore. Any Idea how to get it back?

Have you tried rebooting?

OT

Yes, when I reboot do I need to have the external hard drive connected or disconected?

You can keep it connected.

I am getting this issue as well. The disk utitily says that I only have 25 gb available despite the fact that i've cleared many many files to make it so that I should have MORE than that. In the finder, it says there is in fact 83 GB available. No matter how much more I clear, I am unable to get more than 25 gb while the number in the finder window increases respectively. I suspect that this may be an issue with using SSDs in the retina macs.

here is a snapshot of what i'm talking about.

Same issue here.

I've seen that after "some days" the space is correctly show. Seems that takes some time to the file system to see that there are many gigs marked as free.

BTW, this is pretty silly to me