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This is on my 2013 15" Retina MBP with the 256 SSD.

Before you ask, yes, I'm including the ~/Library folder.

Home Directory Info Panel

My home directory is using ~175GB of space, which is pretty significant. I'm in a spring cleaning mood - however, I cannot seem to get even close to this value when hunting down the largest offenders.

Craigs-MBP:~ Craig$ du -shc *
 27M    Applications
 88K    Desktop
4.2G    Documents
8.0K    Downloads
198M    Google Drive
 25G    Library
8.0K    Movies
4.3G    Music
 11G    Pictures
8.0K    Public
408M    apps
3.2G    projects
 49G    total    <-- Note the convenient total

Just to be safe, I also check the .* files:

Craigs-MBP:~ Craig$ du -shc .??* | grep total
3.8G    total

So, roughly ~55GB.

I have booted into the recovery partition, and used Disk Utility to run First Aid on both the volume and partition, but it didn't pick up any invalid volume count/block sizes. Everything looked good.

I booted up Disk Inventory X hoping that it might find something I didn't, but it turns up the same values:

Disk Inventory X Results

If I'm missing 5-10GB here or there, no big deal. But nearly 120GB of missing space? That's completely unreasonable. (And half my hard drive.)

Where do I go next?

Craig Otis
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    Your problem might have to do with it is not Spring time :) – Ruskes Aug 06 '15 at 17:09
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    It's fattening up for hibernation? – Craig Otis Aug 06 '15 at 17:09
  • hehe ... a good one :) – Ruskes Aug 06 '15 at 17:11
  • so I run a comparison "du -shc *" and all values are as expected, expect you have no movies at all ? and your download folder is also on the low end. What is the 3.2 G projects ? – Ruskes Aug 06 '15 at 17:19
  • Correct - I moved all my movies to a couple externals (I don't need them on my laptop), and the 3.2GB projects are just some development side projects. – Craig Otis Aug 06 '15 at 17:21
  • What does the About this Mac shows ? Does it makes sense to re-index the drive (Spotlight) ? (a overnight job) – Ruskes Aug 06 '15 at 17:21
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    Is Time Machine on? – Jaime Santa Cruz Aug 06 '15 at 23:34
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    Never mind, I thought it might be Time Machine's local snapshots, but they are stored elsewhere (http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/123254/38539) – Jaime Santa Cruz Aug 06 '15 at 23:38
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    I'd also be worried here about the 0 items. The Get Info box should show a correct file count, as well as the space, and it looks like both are screwed up. What's the Info on the whole disk? Are you genuinely missing that space if you check the drive itself? – Alex Aug 06 '15 at 23:40
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    @JaimeSantaCruz It was local backups. Disabling them freed up all the missing space. It might be unrelated, but I'm using FileVault 2. The disk was indeed reporting that the space was missing/in use. After turning off the local Time Machine backups, I had ~140GB of free space, up from the ~35 that it was coasting at before. – Craig Otis Aug 07 '15 at 00:10

3 Answers3

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Take a look at Time Machine, it may be keeping local snapshots.

From Apple Support:

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.

You can disable them, but they get automatically deleted if you need space:

  • 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 snapshot with a new one, then eventually resumes creating snapshots as normal.
Jaime Santa Cruz
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2

It was the Time Machine local backups. After running:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

I have my space back! The /Volumes/MobileBackups/ folder was enormous.

I never use Time Machine aside from restoring from a catastrophic failure, and I don't know if I've ever touched the Time Machine GUI - so the local backups were completely unnecessary for me.

Craig Otis
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0

I can suggest you to try Disk Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com)

It has a visual preview for the size of each file and different colors for groups of files/etc.

Anton Todorov
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