I have a 13-inch MacBook Air, and have been using it for about a year now. There are 23.6 GB of memory that appear to be missing from my hard drive. About This Mac -> Storage shows 91GB of files, of which 61GB are "Other":
The command df -h
agrees, showing 91GB used (command output shown below):
Homes-MacBook-Air:~ BrandonWork$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1 112Gi 91Gi 21Gi 82% 23864730 5456996 81% /
devfs 188Ki 188Ki 0Bi 100% 651 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /home
/dev/disk0s3 620Mi 548Mi 72Mi 89% 140256 18434 88% /Volumes/Recovery HD
/dev/disk3s2 16Mi 9.8Mi 6.2Mi 62% 2503 1581 61% /Volumes/Disk Inventory X
However, here the problem arises, as when I examine the disk, only 67.4GB are actually used:
I have six user accounts on this laptop due to my family borrowing it repeatedly, and have run Disk Inventory X on all of them, as I was told that other users' files could account for it, as they are not visible to non-admins. None of them had more than 2GB of files. I have also used OmniDisk Sweeper, with similar results. I have seen all of the following possible problems and solutions, to no avail:
- Swap files (they are seen by Disk Inventory X)
- Temporary caches (restart your computer; didn't help)
- False volumes in /volumes (checked; don't have anything weird there)
- Viruses (multiple scans with different programs turn up nothing)
On a previous computer, I had a similar problem with eaten memory; turned out to be WinRAR generating huge .txt files, and these could be found with Disk Inventory X.
Best Answer
Both About this Mac and
df
seem to agree that you have 91GiB used, 21GiB free on/
, which adds up to the volume of your 112GiB (120GB) hard drive.The problem must be with the list of files Disk Inventory X scans.
Run
du -s
as a superuser starting from/
and then going deeper into the filesystem to get a more accurate picture of your disk space usage.Keep in mind:
About this Mac and Finder display space in GB (base 10, 1GB = 1000MB)
df -h
anddu -h
show results in GiB (base 2, 1GiB = 1024MiB)df -H
anddu -H
show results in GBMany GUI tools display file size in GiB while labeling it as GB