Sudden decrease on rmbp SSD

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Sudden decrease on rmbp SSD

Hey guys,

So a strange problem - the space on my 250GB SSD (15" rmbp, late 2013) just suddenly decreased from about 120GB free, to 30GB. It happened sometime today, though cant be sure exactly unforunately.

Ran verify disk and repair disk in Disk Utility (some permissions needed fixing, but nothing really came up) - no change.

Ran Disk Inventory X and got this strangeness: As you can see the initial window (top) says 36GB free and used 196GB - then after running the scan it says that the SSD is 137GB full - which should leave about 110GB free - not 36GB

System information shows this:

Finder shows this - showing 88GB free

And finally, Disk Utility shows this - showing 38 GB free

So what the heck is going on? Before, I always had around 120GB free. Didnt install anything, didnt really change anything. Only noticable activity was that I downloaded a couple of things on torrent (legally 🙂) and installed the Civilisation game..about 5GB. Other than that I dont know.

By the way also ran the hardware test - all is fine.

Pls help,

Thanks,

MACBOOK PRO (RETINA, 15-INCH, LATE 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Dec 7, 2013 3:38 PM

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SulllaCorn Author

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Dec 7, 2013 10:01 PM in response to SulllaCorn

Found the issue and its solved now - from this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3235790

From one of the users:

I have successfully reconciled the difference between the reports in DU and Finder. 🙂

I momentarily disabled Time Machine, and the .mobilebackups folder was then cleared of Local Snapshots, a function of Time Machine which saves incremental changes between actual Time Machine backups.

Apparently Finder sees the accumulated data as "free space", because it will be overwritten if need be. However, Disk Utility sees the usage and subtracts it from its calculations of free space.

Once you turn Time Machine back on, Local Snapshots will resume, and your free space will diminish until you hook up a Time Machine drive and perform a backup, or turn off Time Machine to clear the "cache".

There is also a Terminal Command for disabling Local Snapshots, but I think it beyond the scope of this thread.

BTW, This is only an issue on MacBooks, as Desktop Macs don't use Local Snapshots.

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