I noticed the other day that my M2 MacBook Air with 1TB of storage was showing less space available under System Settings than I expected I was using.
After thoroughly combing through my files, and checking with both CleanMyMac X and Disk Inventory X, it appears as if the drive may be miscalculating its usage. For example, see the below image of Disk Inventory X. In the top section of the image you can see the drive reports that 762.8 GB has been used. After opening it (bottom of the image), you can see that it Disk Inventory X only catalogs 326.0 GB worth of files.
In General > Storage, the bulk of this disk usage (623.25 GB) is listed as System Data.
One theory I had is that the delta here may be caused by the file ~/Library/iCloud Drive. In Finder, this file is being listed as the total size of all of the files I store in iCloud. However, only a subset of those files are actually downloaded onto my computer. Although when viewing the info of the file, it does say that the actual size is considerably less.
Even after moving over a hundred gigs files outside of iCloud Drive, which has reduced the size of the file, the space taken up by System Data under General>Storage has remained unchanged.
Rebooting the computer has not fixed it, and running First Aid in Disk Utility reported no issues.
Does anyone know what might be going on here?
My next steps would be to back up my computer to an external hard drive and then restore it from the image, though I would rather not if anyone has tips. I'm also not sure if this error would persist through a restore.
A few other details:
- Time Machine is not enabled
- There is only one user account on this computer
- See below for images from Disk Utility
