Home Folder/Hard drive question

Hi everyone, this is my first post here...I've tried searching the forums and haven't been successful.

First: I'm relatively new to the Mac, I inherited one in December of 2011. It's a 15" MacBook Pro, 2.53 GHz Intel Dual Core, 4GB Ram.

So far I've been able to get along just fine with the Mac. I really enjoy it. Recently I noticed something that's been bothering me and I can't figure it out.

Disk Utility reports my hard drive as having 250GB. However, in Finder, my Home Folder says it has 500GB. I'm understandably confused. Is my hard drive 250 or 500? How do I know for sure? If it's 500, how do I access the other 250?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've included the 'Get Info' windows for each one below.

It would appear that you're using FileVault which I think will explain this. FV works by making your home directory an encrypted disk image. This is why your home directory is /Users/.appleowner/appleowner.sparsebundle. A sparsebundle is a type of disk image - one that grows and shrinks as needed.

According to a post here, FileVault creates the image to be much larger than your HD:

Your home folder shows that larger size because File-vault is a disk image. When it is created, it is created with a logical max-capacity larger than your physical disk then it expands and shrinks as you use it. Its initial space is only as large as necessary to contain the original data.

Click to expand...

Therefore, I believe that the actual size would be 250 but I'll defer to someone who is more familiar with FV for clarification.

Well, it looks like you're probably right...but unfortunately, I can't turn off FileVault. I've been trying all afternoon and finally gave up. Every attempt was unsuccessful and I had to repair my disk permissions twice.

After poking around on the internet, it looks like I have to have at least as much free space as is already being used in the home folder. So, I need to get a bigger backup drive before I can go any further. Thanks for the help, though, and when I get around to turning off FileVault, I let you know if that really was the problem.