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I have a macbook retina with a 120 GB hard drive. I have a few applications, but I have hardly any videos or music to clog the thing up, but I have only 3 GB available it says. I know there could be myriad things still causing this, but I've looked through Disk Utility and OmniDisk and I get no answers. Here's what an OmniDisk sweep shows:

OmniDisk image

HD sweep

Someone please help me; there's a huge application I have to install soon, and I don't know what I can do.

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  • It's something(s) in the Applications and/or usr folders? These two appear to be taking up most of the used space on the disk
    – martineau
    Jan 18, 2014 at 2:52
  • lifehacker.com/5915508/the-best-disk-space-analyzer-for-os-x might help get a better picture
    – Ramhound
    Jan 18, 2014 at 2:54
  • @Ramhound Hey Ramhound, I actually installed this and used it before you commented whilst continuing my investigation. I found that it worked like a freaking charm. Jan 18, 2014 at 9:13

1 Answer 1

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From the screenshot it looks like OmniDiskSweeper did not finish indexing the drive. /System/ should definitely be bigger. Even if it does finish though, it won't include files in directories that can't be accessed by the user.

Try to use du instead:

$ sudo du -h -d1 /
155M    /.DocumentRevisions-V100
112K    /.fseventsd
  0B    /.PKInstallSandboxManager
1.2G    /.Spotlight-V100
  0B    /.Trashes
  0B    /.vol
 36G    /Applications
2.6M    /bin
  0B    /cores
4.5K    /dev
1.0K    /home
9.2G    /Library
1.0K    /net
  0B    /Network
350M    /opt
 12G    /private
980K    /sbin
6.8G    /System
802G    /Users
7.5G    /usr
 12K    /Volumes
875G    /

-d1 sets the depth to 1 and -h uses human-readable file sizes.

If you have enabled Time Machine, the disk space might be taken up by local snapshots. Local snapshots are enabled by default for laptops and disabled for desktop Macs. When they are enabled, Time Machine saves hourly snapshots to /Volumes/MobileBackups/ when a backup disk is not available and there is more than 10% free disk space. The local snapshots are not counted as used disk space in Finder, but they are included under backups in the About This Mac window. See http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878 for more information.

If it's not that, you might have the same issue I had with my MacBook Air. It was missing about 20 GB of disk space that was classified as other in the About This Mac window and shown as hidden space by Daisy Disk. When I tried verifying the Macintosh HD volume in Disk Utility, there was an error about an invalid free block count. I was then able to free up the missing space by repairing the disk from the recovery partition.

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