About This Mac is showing wrong Storage information

This is more than ridiculous. I paid so much for Apple products and for so long. Soon or later, I had systematically ran into major issues greatly overwhelming the benefits I had with the use of these products.

Again here, I am loosing money; losing precious production time; and loosing professional credibility. Moreover, the anxiety caused by this issue is ruining my resting time and further impedes output quality at all fronts.

I am making a sole use of my Mac and only installed few major licensed-paid professional softwares essential to my work. I don't install games; I don't use it for entertainment; and I don't even use productivity apps for office work. I installed proper OS updates and adopted all best practices to avoid any issue.

I am not a fan of online bashing or pessimism but no matter how much I try, I am simply outraged and feel completely ripped off.

Thanks for those who strive to find solutions and whoever participates to this community. After 15 years of renewed struggles and many approaches to obtain solutions from Apple (Apple Care; Apple Store; Apple Support) on their own defective products, I had never been able to have any problems solved by them. I had rather witnessed a series of systematic clever dodges.

We should not even have to spend any time to fix issues like the object of this post. We paid for products who don't deliver what they pretend to and we have to encounter expenses to fix manufacturer issues. There are laws in my country to protect citizens from such commercial practices. However, no one can afford an action against the big fruit.

By the way, I repeatedly attempted all the solutions from this post, including Apple's solution, and nothing worked. In my case, it is more than 500 gig of superflu storage space. Nothing that I could have foreseen and prevent.

Thanks, sincerely thank you, to all who contributed either in sharing their issues, experiences and solutions.

I am sorry for feeding in comments of that nature - it surely doesn't help anyone - but meanwhile, there is a limit to being insulted and Apple has to know.

I was facing the same problem. Solved using the following steps:

1. Go to time machine in system preferences

2. turn off automatic backup

3. select the disk you were using and remove it.

4. this will turn off your time machine.

5. Now restart you Mac.

6. check the storage again. it should now turn back to normal.

7. Connect your time machine disk, and select it again for back.

8. Keep automatic backup option turned off.

This happened in my case because I was using an external hard disk for time machine, and currently it was disconnected.

Hope this solves your problem. 🙂

I do have the same problem. My ''About this Mac'' looks like this at storage:

Tried the Time Machine and Spotlight trick to no avail.

Anyone has more suggestions?

Reindex Spotlight. It uses spotlight to categorize what it finds on the drive. Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Otherwise, I haven’t seen it use the wrong units.

I believe my storage 'graph' is also wrong. Looking at the bar, it would appear that I have very little storage space left, however, I do have 116GB (out of 170GB) free. Also, my Apps do not take up 118GB. The math does not add up and I do not understand the graph appearing that I am max'ing out.

What is going on?

I've just had the same happen to me. I've gone from 130Gb free to 35Gb free. Spotlight reset didn't work. No idea what's happening. Anyone have an idea?

bobsled wrote:

I've just had the same happen to me. I've gone from 130Gb free to 35Gb free. Spotlight reset didn't work.

Did you then restart the computer?

Yes, three times. No change.

This looks like a OS bug to me. I checked with Onmidisksweeper, and it shows I have 101Gb used. That is the used space that was showing on my Mac prior to this new problem developing.

Hopefully an OS update will address the issue, as I can't find a workable solution.

I have found the 101Gb that is now in 'Other' storage and is eating up space on my hard drive. I launched Onmidisksweeper from Terminal to get access to the files. But, can anyone tell me what this huge folder called 'Volumes' is? As it is a sparsebundle, is it a Time Machine issue? And perhaps any ideas oh how to delete it.

I can mark this issue as resolved. It was a Time Machine glitch that wrote to my hard drive and not the external drive 3 days ago. I deleted the sparsebundle, and immediately recovered 101Gb.

To check if this is your issue, use Go to Folder in the Finder menu then enter /volumes

I notice however that a lot of people like me are having a problem with Yosemite adding numbers to the computer name. I have had up to (9) added. In the image I posted previously, there is not only a (2) added to the rogue sparsebundle, but also a 1 after it. So I'm thinking that this renaming bug may be at the root of the problem I had.

To turn off this feature:

1. Go to terminal

2. Paste "

sudo tmutil disablelocal"

3. Type your password

4. Restart system

You should then have full disk space.

I FOUND A SOLUTION (FOR ME)!!

My problem was that storage information showed 53 gigs of apps, but I only have 20. After that i used some terminal command that makes the storege bar goes just "other" and free space..

Solution: Google Deeper app. It's a free maintence app. Once you downloaded, open it up and go to Misc. tab. Under this tab you will find a section called spotlight. Now uncheck/check "turn on indexing ..." and use the delete existing data. It sloved my problem, hope yours too.