Macintosh HD "Space Available" much less than expected based on size of folders

[talkin73]

Using Big Sur 11.4 on 16" MBP 2019 with 4TB drive. Get Info on Macintosh HD (the only drive I have) says 620GB remaining of 4TB drive. The 4 folders on the root of the drive are listed below with respective file sizes that show in Get Info:

Applications - 67.2 GB
Library - 23.15 GB
System - 26.24 GB
Users - 2.17 TB

The total is about 2.23 GB, that leaves 1.77 GB remaining on the drive though some is surely taken up by the system OS about 16GB from what I can see. But that is HUGE gap between the 1.77 GB that should be remaining vs the 620 GB that the system tells me is remaining.

I viewed hidden files on the root directory of Macintosh HD with Shift+CMD+. and the size of all these combined is minuscule. Nowhere near accounting for the 1.1TB discrepancy.

This all seems very weird. Why these discrepancy where numbers don't add up at all and is there actually free space I can somehow reclaim?

 

[MickeyVee]

I went through the exact same exercise a few days ago. For the life of me could not figure it out after Google searches and tried all the tricks to reclaim the disk space.
Did a SuperDuper 3.5 bootable backup and the difference in storage was about 300GB.. so what the heck, booted off the backup, blew away the internal drive, restored and the rebooted. Lo and behold, it solved the problem and reclaimed the 300GB.
Definitely a nuclear option but it worked! BTW, Big Sur 11.6.1.

 

[ader42]

Am also using Big Sur 11.6.1 on my M1 Mini and it seems to me that the finder does not update the folder sizes no matter what I do.

I found this because I deleted some big files in an attempt to free up some space, but deleting files did not in fact recover any space according to the finder/folder info.

Relaunching finder and rebooting made no difference.

I currently have a user folder that is appraently 13.5 GB in size but the contents actually amount to less than 2GB.

I do suspect it may have to do with “purgeable data” which is shown in the get info for the drive - but in my opinion, if this is so this should be mentioned in the get info of my user folder too.

 

[appltech]

I'd suggest using apps like Disk Inventory X to figure out what's taking the space, if the topic is still relevant. This app helped me a lot to figure out where the disk space is going (note that it will not allow you to remove certain locked folders).
Also, have you updated your macOS to 11.6.2 recently? The problem with Finder may have been resolved in that release

 

[talkin73]

Here's what I got from OmniDiskSweeper and what I see with Get Info on my single partition Macintosh HD drive. It seems bizarre that the drive shows 3.4TB being used by Get Info and Omni shows 1.8TB being used. TechToolPro is popping up alerts that I have only 15% of my drive left, which means its reading the same system info as Get Info shows me on the Macintosh HD. I thought APFS system was supposed to be "efficient" but on an old Mac OS 1.8TB equaled 1.8TB. On Big Sur, it appears that 1.8TB equals 3.4TB, which is nuts. If it's not data that I've put there, what on earth is taking up an additional 1.6TB of space?!