Hard drive 'lost' space after upgrade to Mountain Lion

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I upgraded my mac to os x mountain lion a couple of days ago and yesterday , I found out that according to Finder I ‘lost’ a lot of hard disk space. I have a 160G hard drive and before the upgrade (Snow Leopard) I had only used 50G so I should have 110G after the upgrade. But after the upgrade, Finder shows I have used 130G and only have 30G left. I then went into disk utility and it also provided the same info. I ran verify disk and repair disk permission, to no avail. I then ran OMNI Disk Sweeper but after running it, it confirms that I only used 50G, so I should have 110G left but for some reason it is not showing…..on Finder and Disk Utility. My Trash is empty and I use external hard drives for backup and to store my iTunes content so I don’t understand how I ‘lost’ so much hard drive space……so how do I regain the space?? Please help!!

BTW, I also goggled it and found a number of people seems to have the same problem…but none of the messages offered any solution to this……I am really stumped…..Help! :Oops:
 

chscag

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Let's find out what's going on.... download and install the free Disk Inventory X from here. If you can't understand what it's telling you, take a screenshot of the displayed graph and post it here. Someone will try to help to figure out what's taking up the extra space.
 

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Are you using a laptop/potable Mac (MB Pro, Air, etc) with Time Machine for backup? I know you are using external hard drives but Time Machine stores "snapshots" on your local drive whenever you are away from the designated external. This will give you an idea which backups are actually local snapshots.
 

chscag

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I forgot about that, glad you mentioned it. By the way, do you remember the terminal command that turns off the local snapshots? I had it written down somewhere but misplaced it.
 

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Given my well-publicized allergy to all things Terminal I had to look this up. This says the command is sudo tmutil disablelocal.Snapshots can be restarted with sudo tmutil enablelocal
 

chscag

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Thanks Sly! This time I saved it in my notes.
 

Slydude

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You're welcome. I've never bothered to memorize that command either. My MB Pro is on our home network and within range of my backup drive most of the time.
 
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To Slydude - I use a macbook with an external time machine for backups. I have set up a TM for a long time with no prior issue. So not sure why this is tripping me up...?
 
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To SlyDude
Thanks for the Terminal Command...unfortunately I bought my MB second hand and I don't know the password required to enter a Terminal command....do you know how to get round this?
 

Slydude

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That might not be the cause of your lost space but it is one thing to look at since it is a relatively ne feature any often forgotten.

From what you are saying that might not be the issue but here's one way to get a rough idea whether that's a problem.

1. Open the Time Machine program like you are going to restore a file. In other words go to the Time Machine program not the preference pane.
2. Look at the tick marks on the right side of the screen. The gray tick marks are local snapshots stored on the internal drive. Normally Time Machine is supposed to release that space if drive space gets low but something mat have gone wrong there.

For the password you must be logged in under an administrator account. Then use the password for that account. So If Bullwinkle is the account name and "Rocky" is the password type Rocky at the prompt and hit Return/Enter.
 
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chas_m

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Two things:

1. I can't recall when it started, but somewhere in the last few OS releases, Apple started calculating HD sizes differently, going from 1024 MB = 1GB to 1000MB = 1GB. Maybe that explains the loss and why the tools that still measure the "old" way tell you that you don't have any loss.

2. If you don't have an admin password for that computer, it's not your computer.
 

Slydude

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Two things:

1. I can't recall when it started, but somewhere in the last few OS releases, Apple started calculating HD sizes differently, going from 1024 MB = 1GB to 1000MB = 1GB. Maybe that explains the loss and why the tools that still measure the "old" way tell you that you don't have any loss.

I didn't even think of that as a possibility. Good question.
 
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Hi Slydude,

Thanks for all your tips....anyway I got home and checked my macbook and voila all space 'lost' has been returned magically!!!!! My finder is now showing the right spare disk space... to be honest, I have no idea what happened but I am so glad that it seems to be back to normal.. Thanks again for your help. Much appreciated.
P.
 

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Glad that worked out. Maybe local snapshots were part of the issue. I know that Time Machine starts reclaims the space when drive space gets low. It also starts to reclaim this space when the external drive is reconnected. I don't think I have seen anything definitive about how quickly all of the space is reclaimed. I don't think it happens immediately.
 
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Found a solution - go to disk utility at reboot and perform a verify and repair disk. Bingo! Now all my disk space is back.;)
 
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How did you upgrade without the password out of curiosity?
 

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