Storage question.

Question

Storage question.

Hi All,

Pretty new to Mac's, if I go into About this Mac, then storage it says that I'm using about 100gb of my HDD but if I go to the Macintosh HD shortcut from the desktop and look at the file sizes for all folders plus pictures etc it adds up to about 60gb. Can anyone tell me where the extra 40gb may be?

MacBook Pro, iOS 8.3

Posted on Apr 25, 2015 12:36 PM

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Answer 1

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dominic23

Level 10

83,904 points

Apr 25, 2015 12:52 PM in response to theflyingbananaman

Discrepancy in calculating space between Finder and Disk Utility

“Finder does not take into account the Backups/ local snapshots,

but disk utility includes them.”

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

Disk space / Time Machine ?/ Local Snapshots

Local backups

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH18861?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Re-index Macintosh HD.

This will take a while. Wait until it is finished.

System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409

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Answer 2

Apr 25, 2015 12:57 PM in response to dominic23

Thank you, I have also just updated to 10.10.3 and I'm sure that I had about 30gb less than i do now. Had to delete my time capsule backup disc as it was taking ages to backup found that it run a lot quicker backing up to a fresh disc. Any ideas about this?

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Answer 3

dominic23

Level 10

83,904 points

Apr 25, 2015 1:26 PM in response to theflyingbananaman

Learn how local snapshots use storage on your startup drive

“To make sure that you have storage space when you need it, Time Machine creates and retains local snapshots only when there is plenty of free space on your startup drive:

If less than 20% of the total storage space on your startup drive is available, Time Machine removes local snapshots, starting with the oldest, until you have more than 20% free space.
If less than 10% or less than 5GB of storage space is available, Time Machine removes local snapshots more quickly. When only one snapshot remains, Time Machine stops creating new snapshots. As free space increases, Time Machine at first replaces the previous screenshot with a new one, then eventually resumes creating snapshots as normal.

Because Time Machine removes local snapshots as needed, Finder and Get Info windows don't include them in their calculations. To see how much storage space local snapshots are using, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, then click Storage. The space used by local snapshots is labeled Backups.”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

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