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Level 1

0 points

When looking at my "About This Mac" it says that I have 60gb of space left on my hard drive, but when I go into finder to find all of these files there is not 300gb worth in anything I search, even searching, "All files on the Mac". Help!?

It says I have over 150 gigs of video on my hard drive. But I have gone through and deleted almost all of what shows up, still it says there is roughly the same amount on the hard drive. Where are these files? I want to delete them so I can have my hard drive clear.

Thanks for your help guys!

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jun 9, 2013 12:04 AM

21 replies

OGELTHORPE

Level 9

57,305 points

Jun 10, 2013 2:07 AM in response to Pondini

Pondini, greetings:

Pondini wrote:

OGELTHORPE wrote:

. . .

My speculative thinking was along the lines that it may make backups more efficient and hence faster.

That's what I thought at first, too.

Even though incorrect, it is gratifying to know that I was thinking along the same lines as one of the forum 'heavyweights'. Perhaps there is hope for me yet. 😀

Intuitively I would think that a good indexing system would be more efficient than duplicating, especially in the case of large files. Again I appreciate the education.

Ciao.

ds store

Level 7

30,735 points

Jun 10, 2013 5:27 AM in response to Pondini

Pondini wrote:

So it's mostly smoke and mirrors with indexes and such, and no data copying. Pretty slick!

Not slick, because it's causing issues when people need to free up drive space for other uses that outweigh the incredibly rare times they delete items accidentally.

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jun 10, 2013 6:19 AM in response to ds store

Soorry, I meant the way it works is slick.

The way it's presented is awful. 😟

And no, people don't need to free up drive space. OSX deletes them automatically, as needed, to keep the drive under 80% full. That's why the Finder ignores them.

Message was edited by: Pondini

LowLuster

Level 6

12,105 points

Jun 10, 2013 6:20 AM in response to ds store

I concur with that.

LowLuster

Level 6

12,105 points

Jun 10, 2013 6:20 AM in response to Pondini

In theory that is what is supposed to happen. But then we have posts about the os saying the disk is full and some times it is these useless snapshots that are filling the drive and the os does not delete them.

Pondini wrote:

The way it works is slick.

The way it's presented is awful. 😟

And no, people don't need to free up drive space. OSX deletes them automatically, as needed, to keep the drive under 80% full. That's why the Finder ignores them.

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jun 10, 2013 6:32 AM in response to LowLuster

LowLuster wrote:

In theory that is what is supposed to happen. But then we have posts about the os saying the disk is full and some times it is these useless snapshots that are filling the drive and the os does not delete them.

I've not seen one where that was really the case.

Remember, that #$&% display is driven by Spotlight; if there are a lot of snapshots, and/or Spotlight is borked or not up-to-date, even turning Time Machine OFF may not seem to gain much, if any space immediately on that display. If in doubt, double-check via Disk Utility; as far as I can tell, that does get updated immediately.