About This Mac is showing wrong Storage information

I had exactly this issue, but fixed it by entering:

sudo mdutil -E /

into Terminal. This is a more efficient way of reindexing Spotlight. It will prompt you for a password then will re-enable indexing, and About this Mac will work again.

Your suggestion led me to use Onyx to re-index spotlight and it worked like a charm. After restart everything showed the correct space on the disk. It was driving me nuts- so much so I thought I might have to do a clean install to fix it. Thanks for the tip.

I will try reindexing Spotlight in OnyX, but I wanted to share the…um…peculiar nature of the incorrect drive usage I'm seeing in the Finder and in About This Mac.

I noticed today that the Finder thinks I have an amount of storage on my MBP that I've never seen on less than a high-load server:

Somehow, the Finder has gotten the idea that I have a boot drive of more than 700 terabytes! I only wish…

It gets more interesting when I look at it in About This Mac:

It correctly recognizes that it's really a 500 GB disk, but it thinks backups (likely local snapshots) occupy 700 TB. The odds of that being remotely correct are really slim, since it's been only a week since I did a clean reinstall of Yosemite on this disk after wiping it, and my total attached storage is less than 6 TB, most of which is excluded from my TM backups, and the snapshots on Blackbird should be only of Blackbird anyway. Even if it's counting each instance of a TM hard link, that's far more instances than would be created in that time—that's 1400 full backups of a 500 GB disk (assuming the disk is full, which it isn't), or 200 a day for a week.

Now, I did disable local snapshots through OnyX yesterday, so I'm sure there's a reclaimed space question, but I have rebooted since then. And that still doesn't explain 700 virtual terabytes of snapshots.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at my TM disk as well:

Harrier is my TM drive. There is nothing on it except my TM backups. But About This Mac doesn't recognize that most of that usage as backups—it marks it as "other". Not a real issue, but interesting nonetheless.

At any rate, I hope that reindexing Spotlight and rebooting resolves the discrepancy. Path Finder isn't fooled, but I switch back and forth between Path Finder and the Finder through the day, as each has different strengths, and it's just plain disconcerting to look at that status bar and and see 700 TB free.

I'm having a similar issue. MacBook Air 6,2 (13-inch, Mid 2013). In some places — System Information, most command line tools — the correct amount of free space is shown. But About This Mac, Storage and the desktop info are both confused in much the same way as Mark's computer.

A reboot did not fix the problem. I'll try a Spotlight re-index overnight. So far, no other visible impacts on performance.

A few hours later, I have the reverse problem — now I have more space reported by the Finder (free space in icon and via Get Info) than via command line tools (df, diskutil). So is this just a curiosity? I'm guessing the issue is space claimed and reclaimed as normal file operations (copy, delete), encryption, decryption, and backup interact with each other. Anyone got a technical reference which describes how the Mac OS reports free disk space?

My situation has gotten weirder also. After a Spotlight reindex and reboot, the Finder changed to showing only ~150 TB free (still an outlandish number). Now, three days later, it shows nearly 850 TB free! ***???

I think I may try re-enabling and re-disabling local snapshots, with a reboot between each, to see if that helps. I never saw anything like this prior to Yosemite—the Finder's free space number would get a little wonky immediately after disabling snapshots, but it would go to normal after a reboot, if not sooner. What changed in Yosemite that might account for this?

I'm not sure all of this weirdness has to do with Time Machine, but I figured one thing out: the free space shown in Get Info counts Time Machine backups as free.

61.97GB free + 6.42GB backups = 68.38GB, close enough to the 68.39GB visible in the hard drive icon above the About this Mac, Storage window.

(Yep, I've been doing some serious cleaning up the past few days.)

Yes, that's how the TM local snapshots are handled by the Finder. Apple doesn't want users to normally be aware that snapshots are occupying additional space on their drives, so the Finder adds the size of the local snapshots to the "free space" it reports. The About This Mac window shows those as Backups, which, as you computed, generally account for the full amount of the discrepancy. Third-party utilities that use that file system information (like Path Finder and Omni Disk Sweeper) typically are accessing that info directly from the Unix side rather than querying the Finder, so they aren't fooled either.

Similarly, from my own screenshots I posted earlier, you can see that About This Mac reports 703.68 TB of Backups and 180.37 GB (or ~0.18 TB) free. Those add up to match the 703.86 TB free reported by the Finder. So it's obvious that the reported amount of Backups is where the entire discrepancy comes from. I just have not yet been able to figure out how it's calculating 700+ TB of Backups on a 500 GB (0.5 TB) drive.

Speaking of which, my Finder-reported free space has not changed since my last post two days ago (~850 TB). I haven't had a chance yet to do any additional testing and troubleshooting (I still have real work to do as well), but I'll report back with the results once I do.

THis command immediately fixed my storage display issue. No restart needed. Now it's correct.

Well, I don't know what's going on, but everything looks correct now. The Finder was reporting ~150 TB free earlier today with local snapshots enabled. After disabling local snapshots again, it now shows 123.81 GB free. About This Mac shows 123.75 GB free with 71 MB of backups (total 123.82 GB, close enough with rounding).

Running 10.10.3 here too.

I didn't erase free space or Spotlight index or anything. My Mac just went back to the right totals after a day or so.

I haven't seen any issues with Spotlight (or any issues at all other than the wonky numbers).

Thank you so much! its working fine now

Ok, I am having a similar issue, but I am unable to correct it. I first noticed that Finder showed I had less than 60 GB free on my drive, although I should only have about 60 GB used on my 256 GB MacBook Pro drive. I read that this could be caused by Time Machine snapshots, so I first turned off Time Machine, rebooted, and turned Time Machine back on. However, when i went to About This Mac, I saw the only change was that the large section previously labeled "Backups" was now labeled "Other", but Finder and About This Mac both showed less than 60 gigs free. Currently About This Mac shows this:

and finder shows this:

This would be understandable if the space was actually used. However, using both OmniDiskSweeper and Disk Inventory X, I can see that the actual usage on my drive is much less:

I know that the sizes don't match exactly, but they are much closer to what I would expect to see in terms of usage. So far, in addition to disabling and enabling Time Machine, I have tried to reindex Spotlight through various methods (System Prefs, Onyx, Terminal command mentioned in this post), I have disabled local snapshots by terminal command, and I securely erased free space through Disk Utility. I have restarted multiple times. Nothing seems to fix this strange issue. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.