cjkirkby

Q: Spotlight, Finder and Disk Utility showing incorrect drive usage

Hi all,

 

I've spent the last few days trying to track down why OS X El Capitan is reporting 10.7GB of "Backups" and having no luck getting to the bottom of it. I've tried all the usual suspects - disabling Time Machine & local snapshot and reindexing Spotlight - but still with no luck.

 

I noticed something today as I was backing up files to an external hard-drive - "About this Mac" -> "Storage" was showing the same amount of "Backups" spaced used on my startup disk and external drive. After cleaning everything off the external drive, it still showed 10.7GB of backups on the external drive. Even after reformatting the drive with Disk Utility, it still showed 10.7GB of backups:

Screen Shot 2016-07-09 at 10.20.49 PM.png

Disk Utility reports a similar amount of space as negative usage on the freshly formatted drive:

Screen Shot 2016-07-09 at 10.23.20 PM.png

And Finder appears to agree with Disk Utility that my drive has 10.7GB more space available than its maximum capacity:

Screen Shot 2016-07-09 at 10.25.37 PM.png

I suspect that Spotlight is the culprit - if I disable Spotlight for the external drive, "About this Mac" -> "Storage" appears to display the drive usage correctly (though Finder and Disk Utility still both report too much space available)

 

I've disabled & reenabled Spotlight for both the startup and external drives, but once its has reindexed them, it still shows the same 10.7GB of backups on both drives.

 

Is there a method for more thoroughly clearing Spotlight indexes/cache that I haven't come across yet?

 

Any assistance would be appreciated.

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013), OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Jul 9, 2016 5:39 AM