I have a 250G disk on my Mac with around 100G in use. But the system reports only around 20G of free space. I'm using macOS 10.13.2. I have the problem at least since the upgrade to High Sierra, but probably also before.
"About This Mac" –> "Storage" reports that "System" is using around 180G. But if I check the complete disk, it looks like that:
$ sudo du -cxhd 1 /
0B /.HFS+ Private Directory Data
1.0K /home
4.3G /usr
4.2G /.Spotlight-V100
1.0K /net
34G /nix
0B /.PKInstallSandboxManager
0B /.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware
2.6M /bin
0B /Network
1.1M /sbin
3.8G /Library
0B /.Trashes
6.5G /System
476K /.fseventsd
du: /private/var/db/ConfigurationProfiles/Store: Operation not permitted
du: /private/var/folders/z7/[...]/0/SafariFamily: Operation not permitted
du: /private/var/folders/z7/[...]/0/com.apple.LaunchServices.dv: Operation not permitted
du: /private/var/folders/z7/[...]/0/com.apple.nsurlsessiond: Operation not permitted
du: /private/var/folders/z7/[...]/0/com.apple.routined: Operation not permitted
du: /private/var/folders/zz/[...]/0/com.apple.nsurlsessiond: Operation not permitted
8.0G /private
8.6M /.DocumentRevisions-V100
0B /.vol
32G /Users
11G /Applications
207M /opt
5.0K /dev
4.0K /Volumes
0B /cores
104G /
104G total
df
also says that only 20G are available:
$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 234Gi 211Gi 20Gi 92% 4019132 9223372036850756675 0% /
Any tool I was using (Finder, Disk Inventory X, etc.) shows more or less the same numbers like df
and du
.
Output of mount
:
$ mount
/dev/disk1s1 on / (apfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s4 on /private/var/vm (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
I read and tested many, many things like:
- https://superuser.com/questions/1270727/macos-10-13-1-high-sierra-disk-space-imac
- https://superuser.com/questions/1259175/mac-disk-full-error-but-plenty-of-space
- High Sierra disk space issues
- How can I figure out what's slowly eating my HD space?
… but with no success. So what could consume more than 100G of disk space without showing up in any tool?
Update
Running „First Aid“ in recovery mode:
What does this error message mean?
error: btn:1: invalid key order (1) oid 440198 / oxid 114577
fsroot tree is invalid.
Update 2018-01-25
Another report of the same error: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8246182 (but no answers, yet)
I'm pretty sure this file system error is the root cause for the missing disk space. But I have no idea how to fix that. I was hoping that 10.13.3 would maybe solve it, but it didn't change anything. I guess I need to reinstall…
Best Answer
It seems like the two most likely candidates are a mounted (shared) disk overwriting a location with large files, hiding them from your view, or large (or many many small) files that are held open by a process, but have already been deleted. If you haven't rebooted the computer yet, that's worth a shot, but also booting into recovery mode and running first aid on the disk might help.
lsof | grep deleted
might also reveal interesting information, if lsof is available on OSX (I assume it is, but I've never looked)I've also noticed in my own use that if I use a tool like DiskInventory or Grand Perspective and there are other users on the system, they won't show the size of other users files if I don't have read access to them (reasonably so). If you have other users on your system, they may have large files in their home directory you're not seeing.