Question about storage stuck on calculating

[lakerchick4life]

Hi everyone just a quick question. I know Im probably harping on nonsense but just wanted to be sure since Im new to the whole Macbook experience. I have the macbook pro 2017 laptop purchased it a few months ago..so today after downloading the new mac high sierra update, I always like to go into about my mac and go to storage..I notice it never moves from "Calculating" I asked two apple techs over the phone and they said its totally normal and could take hours for it to change when I go to manage everything pops up immediately..I have only used about 50GB total(And that is including the operating system, hardly have anything on it) but just wanted to be sure that everything with my hard drive is OK..I assume if there were something wrong I wouldnt need to check that to figure it out. so just wanted to be put at ease
Thanks

 

[Weaselboy]

My MacBook Pro does that also sometimes and if I just wait a couple minutes it will finish "calculating" and show the storage amounts. It takes longer to calculate when you do OS updates like that also because it has to reindex the drive.

 

[jerryk]

The techs are correct, it can take hours.

Macs do some interesting things depending upon the applications you run. For example if you run Time Machine, and are disconnected from the backup media for a while you can see large amount of System space consumed because it is caching changed files which get reallocated after Time Machine completes. I had this happen to me when I saw a difference of 100GB in the free space shown and the actual used space calculated by a script I wrote.

 

[lakerchick4life]

Thank you both so much for responding to my message. Yesterday when I went to the apple store I played around with two of the same macs that I have and they both showed my storage info within seconds while mine just says calculating..when I asked the apple genius about it he said "that is not normal" but Im not sure if he knew much about this..so if you both say this is completely normal I will leave it alone..it would be nice to see the storage with the different colors and stuff..I have put in updates from the mac every time they released a new firmware so perhaps that is why it says calculating? As long as this doesnt mean anything is wrong with my hard drive I will leave it alone..unless there is a way to fix it

 

[Weaselboy]

What you might try is reindexing Spotlight by running this command in Terminal. That readout gets its data from Spotlight and this might help. Even still, mine often goes back to that "calculating" business sometimes.

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[lakerchick4life]

What you might try is reindexing Spotlight by running this command in Terminal. That readout gets its data from Spotlight and this might help. Even still, mine often goes back to that "calculating" business sometimes.

sudo mdutil -E /

In the store the apple macbook pros calculated within seconds..is that because they hardly have anything on it? Ever since I got mine I know Ive updated it multiple times so maybe that's why..perhaps I need to leave it on for an hour or so to do it what do you think? I know its silly to harp on something like this but I always like to double check to make sure everything is OK..if this happens to you and its totally normal at least I know Im not the only one

 

[dianeoforegon]

Your best option is to use Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities to see free space. You can also turn on View > Show Status bar to show available space in a Finder window.

A LOT of stuff gets included in "System." Notes, reminders, map caches, browser caches and history, SMS, MMS and iMessages, fonts and more all get included in "System." The storage graphic is often wrong. It uses the Spotlight index and when that index gets corrupted the readings are all wrong.

 

[lakerchick4life]

Your best option is to use Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities to see free space. You can also turn on View > Show Status bar to show available space in a Finder window.

A LOT of stuff gets included in "System." Notes, reminders, map caches, browser caches and history, SMS, MMS and iMessages, fonts and more all get included in "System." The storage graphic is often wrong. It uses the Spotlight index and when that index gets corrupted the readings are all wrong.

Yeah I mean I dont have that much stuff on my macbook..Ive only apparently used 50gb out of 256GB that it came with..and that is including the operating system. I have installed Final Cut Pro, Logic, twitterific, Affinity Photo, and microsoft office 365..when I go to manage it shows everything correctly on the left hand side so I think if the hard drive were corrupted or something I would get some kind of error message so that isnt it..should I just leave the computer on for a while and hope that it changes? Just so weird, in the apple store it shows up within seconds and they are on the latest operating system so not sure what is going on
[doublepost=1519600816][/doublepost]

What you might try is reindexing Spotlight by running this command in Terminal. That readout gets its data from Spotlight and this might help. Even still, mine often goes back to that "calculating" business sometimes.

sudo mdutil -E /

if I do that it wont mess anything up right..LOL Im so overly worried about this thing dont want to mess anything up, Im a PC gal so macs are a new thing to me

 

[dianeoforegon]

Reindexing Spotlight won't do anything bad to your Mac. It just resets the Spotlight cache on your Mac. Search will be a slow until it finishes reindexing.

Did you start a Time Machine backup then stop it? In High Sierra it makes Time Machine snapshots. If you don't attach your Time Machine drive this can add up to space used on your Mac. One user rerported his entire drive snapshot was still on his drive causing it to fill up his storage.

To find all the local timemachine snapshots. Enter this command in the Terminal:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Delete them one by one using

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot_date>

Delete all :

sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4

If that fails you can use

tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 999999999999999

See this post:

This "feature" with APFS + TimeMachine local snapshot is very annoying as time machine will cache whatever you dump into your computer locally on your machine. If you dump 300GB files on your desktop, it WILL cache it in the local snapshot. And it will stay on your computer even after you delete the original file. Yes, you just lost 300GB space even you have already delete the original file.

You will have to manually delete the local snapshot in TimeMachine to get back your space."

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...able-space-please-help.2077666/#post-25222356

 

[Weaselboy]

if I do that it wont mess anything up right..LOL Im so overly worried about this thing dont want to mess anything up, Im a PC gal so macs are a new thing to me

It won't hurt a thing. It just reindexes Spotlight.

 

[lakerchick4life]

Reindexing Spotlight won't do anything bad to your Mac. It just resets the Spotlight cache on your Mac. Search will be a slow until it finishes reindexing.

Did you start a Time Machine backup then stop it? In High Sierra it makes Time Machine snapshots. If you don't attach your Time Machine drive this can add up to space used on your Mac. One user rerported his entire drive snapshot was still on his drive causing it to fill up his storage.

To find all the local timemachine snapshots. Enter this command in the Terminal:

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

Delete them one by one using

Delete all :

If that fails you can use



See this post:

No I didnt do any time machine thing, heck I dont even know what that is LOL..wil try the reindexing later by going into finder and typing that thing in and see what happen so after I type it in I just sit back and will be told when its done?

 

[dianeoforegon]

No I didnt do any time machine thing, heck I dont even know what that is

Open System Preferences > Time Machine and see if you checked to enable. It's possible you turned it on by mistake.

Just like a seat belt and an air bag protect you in different ways when driving, you need both Time Machine and a clone for full protection.

You will need an external drive.

Software used to Clone:

CarbonCopyCloner http://www.bombich.com/download.html (All options are available free for 30 days)

SuperDuper! http://www.shirt-pocket.com/ (Free forever to do an erase and install. Purchased version allows for smart updates and schedules)

 

[amclellan84]

I am having this issue on a brand new Mac Studio with MacOS Ventura... only used about 50GB of my 500GB SSD - everything is working flawless apart from this. Anyone know a solution? Checking storage should be near instant, yet it is stuck on "Calculating".

TIA.