Diff between diskutility and finder on free space

disk-spacedisk-utility

I came across this today :

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At first I was like : "Caching bastard." but no… The finder is right and the diskutil is wrong… Why ?

Best Answer

The reason is probably that you have local snapshots of time machine backups (http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht4878). The difference is that the Finder calculates the free space you can use (the backups would be deleted if necessary). They are stored at /.MobileBackups (at least that's what it has been in Mavericks iirc) if you want to have a look and verify how much space it is consuming.

Other possible causes:

  • some people claim that if you have disk encryption enabled those values may differ
  • maybe Disk Utility was opened before you removed some files and didn't refresh?
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