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Hello, I need to reduce the usage of my hard drive to allow the Big Sur update to happen. I noticed as I was working on it that the storage figures are confused. Could you tell me why the space taken up by documents is estimated at 203gb whereas my hard drive is 121gb? At the same time I'm struggling to find which files could even be taking up the 121gb - 30gb = 91gb that this claims. Any clarifications gratefully received. Thanks
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15
The Storage section in About this mac is notoriously wrong almost all the time.
Sometimes rebuilding the Spotlight index can help sort it out.
How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac – Apple Support
Move the Macintosh HD (or the name you gave your disk) in to the Privacy panel.
Quit System Preferences.
Open System Preferences> Spotlight> Privacy highlight Macintosh HD and press the minus button.
The mac will start rebuilding the Spotlight index.
Check by clicking on Spotlight in the menubar and enter word, if it is indexing you should see a progress bar.
If re-indexing has not solved your problem then run this app, https://www.omnigroup.com/more
this will give an accurate account of the storage used. When the app has created its overview you can look at
the Users folder in the output and see what each user has stored, you can then delete files from there.
Do not delete any files or folders in any System or Library folders or any files you do not understand.
The Storage section in About this mac is notoriously wrong almost all the time.
Sometimes rebuilding the Spotlight index can help sort it out.
How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac – Apple Support
Move the Macintosh HD (or the name you gave your disk) in to the Privacy panel.
Quit System Preferences.
Open System Preferences> Spotlight> Privacy highlight Macintosh HD and press the minus button.
The mac will start rebuilding the Spotlight index.
Check by clicking on Spotlight in the menubar and enter word, if it is indexing you should see a progress bar.
If re-indexing has not solved your problem then run this app, https://www.omnigroup.com/more
this will give an accurate account of the storage used. When the app has created its overview you can look at
the Users folder in the output and see what each user has stored, you can then delete files from there.
Do not delete any files or folders in any System or Library folders or any files you do not understand.
Thanks for your quick advice. The re-indexing didn't work, but the OmniDiskSweeper was very helpful to find some very large apps I wasn't using, and didn't know were there (not in the Applications list). Thanks again
About This Mac storage figures
