Finder not showing correct free space

[dauber]

So I have my drive on my iMac (details in sig) divvied into two partitions: the boot partition with the apps installed, and a second partition (named "Junk") that's just data - sound files, videos, documents, etc.

Well...Finder is reporting that "Junk" has 3.5 gigabytes free. Anything else -- Disk Utility, About This Mac, a warning modal in GarageBand, other Macs networked to it, etc. -- shows about 500 megabytes.

Here's what I've done so far:
- Emptied the trash
- Booted from the recovery partition and run Disk Utility's "First Aid" on the partition
- Checked with Drive Genius, which found no problems
- sudo tmutil disablelocal and sudo tmutil enablelocal (rebooting each time)
- sudo mdutil -E / and sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Junk
- deleting large files -- Finder still reports about 3 gigabytes more space than everything else

What else should I do shy of just backing up the partition, reformatting, and starting fresh?

 

[Weaselboy]

Have you emptied your trash?

If that does not help, run the command below in Terminal and it will show all folders, including anything hidden and their size in GB for that drive. Give it a minute to complete.

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /Junk

 

[richard2]

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /Junk

You omitted "/Volumes/" from the path.

 

[Weaselboy]

You omitted "/Volumes/" from the path.

And so I did.... thanks for the catch!

OP... make that:

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /Volumes/Junk

 

[dauber]

Oh yeah. Trash is definitely empty. I'll try that terminal command. Thanks!

 

[dauber]

BTW, what do I do *after* executing that command?? All it does is show me a list, right?? Then what??

 

[Weaselboy]

BTW, what do I do *after* executing that command?? All it does is show me a list, right?? Then what??

It will show the root folders on the drive, and the amount of space each is using, then a total at the bottom so we can see how that compares to what Finder is showing you. It will also show any hidden folders Finder would not normally show so we can see if that might be using up unaccounted for space.

 

[dauber]

Well, the thing is...with that list, I'm not seeing anything suspicious. If I cd into the hidden directories, it looks like they're just aliases of the main contents...

Oh...another suggestion I read was to toggle Time Machine on and off, and if that didn't work to force a backup. (My backup drive had somehow become unplugged and a backup hadn't happened in over a month!) That didn't work either.

 

[Weaselboy]

Well, the thing is...with that list, I'm not seeing anything suspicious. If I cd into the hidden directories, it looks like they're just aliases of the main contents...

Oh...another suggestion I read was to toggle Time Machine on and off, and if that didn't work to force a backup. (My backup drive had somehow become unplugged and a backup hadn't happened in over a month!) That didn't work either.

What hidden folders are you seeing? There would be some aliased hidden folders on the OS main drive, but I can't think why there be anything like that on a second partition.

What does the total at the end of that output say compared to Finder and Disk Util?

Don't bother with the tmutil commands or turning Time Machine off and on. What that is all about is removing the hidden local snapshots that are in the folder /.MobileBackups. But Time Machine's local snapshots are only enabled on Mac portables, so it won't be enabled or an issue on your iMac.

 

[dauber]

Well, the "du" command kind of underreported a lot -- I'm guessing it doesn't tell me so much as gigabytes as gibibytes, which are based on multiples of 1024 opposed to the metric 1000. But yeah, the hidden folders were what you'd expect: .DS_Store (a file, not a folder, but hey), .Spotlight-V100, .MobileBackups, .fseventsd, .TemporaryItems, and .DocumentRevisions-V100. Heh...actually, the "du" command rounded *up* to the nearest gigabyte -- if a folder had so much as 5k in it, it'd show up as a gigabyte. I used the "-h" option for human-readability and it gave me a more accurate reading.

Anyway, I'm finding this to be to no avail; I'm just going to offload this stuff to an external drive, wipe out the partition, and move it all back.

Thanks for the help, though!

 

[richard2]

I use the command "df -lh" to ascertain the exact amount of free space on my volumes because I don't trust Finder or like base 10 units.