About this Mac reporting incorrect amount of free space

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Level 1

115 points

About this Mac reporting incorrect amount of free space

Instead of wiping my hard drive clean, I created a new user with admin privileges. I then logged in as the new user and completely deleted (using secure delete option) the old user. After a restart, I see that there is no music in iTunes, no pictures in iPhoto, and All My Files shows absolutely nothing. Which is exactly what I'd expect. I also looked in the Music, Movies, Pictures folders and found nothing in them (apart from the basic system-generated files). Trash is empty. No external devices are connected. Time Machine is disabled.

Then I go to About this Mac, and click on Storage. I see 50GB of music, 80GB of images, etc. Where is this 50GB of audio? There are no audio files I can find. I went to Disk Utility and tried the erase free space option -- but this didn't solve anything. I've tried a simple restart. No luck.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Mar 5, 2013 6:12 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 5, 2013 6:29 PM in response to MVW

Local snapshots?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

Did you restart ?

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Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Mar 5, 2013 11:48 PM in response to MVW

From the menu bar, select

 ▹ System Preferences ▹ Spotlight ▹ Privacy

The list of items excluded from Spotlight indexing is shown (it may be empty.) Click the plus (“+”) icon to add an item to the list. Select your boot volume (under DEVICES) and add it to the list. Then remove it from the list by selecting it and clicking the minus (“-“) icon.

Spotlight will rebuild the index. If you try to do a Spotlight search now from the magnifying-glass icon in the top right corner of the display, a pulsing dot will appear in the icon. When the dot disappears, the indexing is complete.

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