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Resolved Question

Mysterious Disk space????

Feb 4, 2012 9:22PM PST

<span id="INSERTION_MARKER">What
do I wrong or what can I do to find out what my real available disk
space is???? <div>There
is a discrepancy in my available disk space between Disk Utility and
ctrl i of my hard disk. The difference is nearly 30 GB and I cannot
find out the cause of it.
I
noticed it when I want to put back a Backup of 90 GB from an external
hard disk to my MacBook Pro (5.3) and the computer informed me that
there was 'not enough space'.
</div><div>With
Disk Utility it says: Used 121 GB and Available 103 GB.
</div><div><span>With
ctrl i it says: Used 94 GB and Available 131 GB. </div><span>Strange!!!!
<div>I
did a clean up with Onyx and I also removed all unused languages with
Monolingual with no result. The difference stays.
</div><div>I
remember from some time ago that I made a Winclone from my Windows 7
partition and by accident this backup came on my MBPro instead of an
external disk. Moving this Winclone backup to the external disk and
to the trash on my computer did not give back the extra space of
around 70 GB.
</div><div><span>Reinstalling Lion (and updates) give me back the space
from before the Winclone backup.
Probably
it is something simple to know what my real available disk space is,
but until now I don't know what to do. </div>

Discussion is locked

Vrijbuiter--2008 has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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disk space changed
Feb 8, 2012 10:55PM PST

The free disk space has been changed this week. It is now with Disk Utility 130 GB and with Ctrl i 132 GB. Why and how I don't know. The difference of 1 or 2 GB does not border me so much, but I still want to know why there is a difference by one method (Disk Utility) or the other (Ctrl i).
Is there a possibility (method) to synchronize it, so I don't have problems with the use of my free disk space?

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solution found
Dec 27, 2012 8:22PM PST

Finally I have found the solution of the missing (free) space on my MacBook Pro. One way to 'recover' the 'lost' space I used free empty space to get more or less the same free space between Disk Utility and the ctrl i.
But two weeks ago I found the origin of the discrepancy.
My Time Machine is always in the 'on' position and when I coupled my Back Up disk to my MacBook Pro it starts to make a new back up. I do this once in two to four weeks.
Now I have learned that my Time Machine is still working when my Back Up disk was not connected to my laptop. It writes invisible files to my MacBook Pro harddisk. You cannot see the 'used' space by ctrl i but with Disk Utility you can see that a amount of space is 'blocked'. You cannot see which files are using this space, but the space itself is not useful.
Now I shut down Time Machine after using it and my problem is solved. No discrepancy anymore between free space (or used space) with Disk Utility and ctrl i and no piling up of used space.

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(NT) Interesting,
Dec 27, 2012 8:37PM PST