Why does my macbook think it has more space than it actually does?

August 4, 2015 4:18 AM

I have a macbook with a 500GB hard drive. It has 196GB of free space right now. I just installed Google Drive. The moment set up was done and the drive folder ready to go, Finder's status bar started telling me that I have 140.9TB available. I checked Disk Utility and this is plainly rubbish - it's still at 196GB like it was 15 minutes ago. What gives? Where did the assessment of all that extra space come from, and how do I make it change back?
posted by 9000condiments to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Try rebooting.
posted by umbú at 4:30 AM on August 4, 2015

disk utility>select your boot drive>repair disk

Then repair permissions, and reboot. Some indexy-bit of the file system got hosed. I think this has happened on every OSX mac i've owned at one point or another. I've seen a few four-billion-terrabyte drives on windows, too.
posted by emptythought at 5:04 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you check the System Info (under the Apple Menu), and go to the Disk/Storage tab, look for local backup data. I noticed a lot more space being used on my Macbook recently but it was a red herring -- Time Machine now uses local backups, but they're not for synching to your actual backup, it's just a local cache to allow you to undelete/revert files. The command line tmutil command allows you to disable local caching, but the caching is intelligent and will automatically downsize if you do need the disk space.

This only applies if you're using Time Machine, but it solved a mystery for me.
posted by mikeh at 1:59 PM on August 4, 2015