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My total physical drive space is 256GB and i am not connected to any remote storage.

When i run du -sxh ./* 2>/dev/null in zsh shell on macOS Big Sur 11.2.3, i get the following results:

39G ./Applications
2.8G ./Library
209G ./System
131G ./Users
2.8G ./private
5.0G ./usr ...(rest of the output is omitted)
total is at around 389GB

So my question is then, why does the the output add put to more than 1.5 of my total physical storage capacity?

In my research on this problem i was primarily relying on this answer. My question is very similar to this one, however 1) there was no response 2) comments there suggested that this is due to hard linked files, which i have supposedly excluded with -x argument

mikeskk
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  • What macOS version? -x is not traverse mount points (so you need that). Man page say hard linked files are only counted once. Your command gives ~590GB on my 512GB disk with 160GB free. I assume you want to do this at the command line so answers like Daisy Disk are not wanted. – Gilby Mar 21 '21 at 06:29
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    See the answers to this question - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/367158/whats-system-volumes-data .. which suggest du doesn't understand "firmlinks" and so counts things twice .. once for the /X version and once for the /System/Volumes/Data/X version – Mr R Mar 21 '21 at 12:14

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