Why do Finder & Disk Utility show different amounts?

[Mark F]

I have a 4TB external drive that I use for TimeMachine backups. The root file in the Finder window called Backups.backupdb is shown to be 3.41tb while Disk Utility shows 3.71tb used. The only other folders are subfolders of Backups.backupdb. Both the Finder window and Disk Utility report that there is 288.53 gb available. A little confusing so I have attached some screen shots.

There seems to be 300gb of missing space. Also, shouldn't Disk Utility and FInder agree on the amount of space used?

Thanks.

Mark

 

[pm-r]

There seems to be 300gb of missing space. Also, shouldn't Disk Utility and FInder agree on the amount of space used?

Try checking out some of these Google hits to get a better understanding of what is or might be going on with your Mac and many seem to have come across the same discrepancies:

Google Search

Hopefully, some of them will answer your question for you, and may depend on your particular situation and backups Etc.





- Patrick
=======

 

[Mark F]

Thanks Patrick. The article seems to assume that Disk Utility is more likely to be incorrect than Finder but in my case I'm wondering if that is so. Both DU and Finder show the same amount of available space. The total of the available space and what DU shows as having been used adds up to 4tb, as I would expect. But the same calculation for Finder leaves 300gb missing (the numbers changed since yesterday). Also, the article suggests starting in Safe mode to fix the issue but does not say how to fix it. BTW, my Trash is a few gigs at most. Less than six.

I thought I could just add up the usage for each of the TM backups folders but unfortunately, Finder does not show the total usage for each of the TM backups. I would have to open each folder and subfolder to see the usage and that is a daunting task.

Thanks again.

Mark

 

[Randy B. Singer]

The difference is that different utilities count different things in the total. The Finder tends not to count metadata and/or anything that is invisible.

To find out what may be invisibly filling up your hard drive, have a look at this Web site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170321110308/http://Pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html

If you seem to have a lot of invisible things filling up your hard drive, the first thing that I would do would be to download:

Maintenance (free)
https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/maintenance.html

and run it and see if it makes a big difference. You may have a ton of log files that need to be deleted.

If that doesn't bring things back in line, I'd look for a huge Time Machine snapshot to your local disk, or if you use DropBox, I'd look for a ton of files that DropBox has stored locally.

The Eclectic Light Company has an excellent article on finding out what is taking up a ton of free space on your hard drive:

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/09/where-did-all-that-free-space-go-on-my-apfs-disk/

 

[MacInWin]

I can second the EclecticLight Company article. One thing that macOS is now doing is storing TM as a snapshot, which means that when it can, it compresses space out of a file. But when that file is brought out of TM, it expands back to original size. Finder struggles with the concept, so you get strange reports. Add iin that APFS also compresses files as it stores them and you have the dilemma of finding out just how much space you really have used.

 

[Mark F]

Thank you all. I've read the EclecticLight article and have established that the (external) disk in question is not formatted with APFS so CCC tells me it does not contain snapshots. That is, I cannot turn the snapshot option on. The disk is used as a TM backup disk so everything on it is TM snapshots.

I also followed Randy's link to OSX Tips Where did my Disk Space go? and established that the total of my log files is about 103mb, far less than the missing 300gb. And also looked at /Volumes and determined that there aren't any false volumes.

I do not see any directories for DropBox. Would it be under a different name or abbreviation that is not obvious?

Thanks again.

Mark

 

[Randy B. Singer]

....established that the total of my log files is about 103mb, far less than the missing 300gb.

Run Maintenance, as I suggested, and see what the new volume total is.

I do not see any directories for DropBox. Would it be under a different name or abbreviation that is not obvious?

Dropbox is a third party product. Did you purchase Dropbox?

 

[Mark F]

Hi Randy,

Dropbox is in my applications. I think I have the free version, not paying for storage.

I've downloaded Maintenance. There are a lot of boxes, not all of which are checked. Do I just use the defaults? I do not see a way to run Maintenance only on the drive in question and not my whole system. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks.

Mark

 

[Randy B. Singer]

I would run all the options except for rebuilding Spotlight's index, icon position on the desktop, and cleaning up automatically saved versions of documents. But running those couldn't hurt, they just aren't necessary unless you are having problems with them. I would also have it rebuild rather than just delete Mail's index.

Maintenance is designed so that it won't do anything that can get you in trouble.

 

[Mark F]

I would run all the options except for rebuilding Spotlight's index, icon position on the desktop, and cleaning up automatically saved versions of documents. But running those couldn't hurt, they just aren't necessary unless you are having problems with them. I would also have it rebuild rather than just delete Mail's index.

Maintenance is designed so that it won't do anything that can get you in trouble.

Thanks again.