Incorrect Free Disk Space in Finder Windows

TidBITS Talk
1
  • Macbook, Apple Silicon
  • everything fine with 15.2
  • update to 15.3
  • now Finder Windows show an incorrect free disk space for non-admin users
  • Disk Utility always, for all users, shows correct free disk space
2

Finder windows’ free space report includes “purgeable” content - files that can be deleted in order to make room for new content. For instance, caches or local copies of cloud files.

It stands to reason that different users will have different amount of purgeable storage, especially if the two accounts are logged in to different (or no) iCloud accounts.

4 Likes
4

This seems to be the issue:

system data stuck on calculating

That was posted on 5 Feb 2025, brandnew; and the person is on 15.3 …

For now I’ll just wait and see, b/c there doesn’t seem to be any problem other than a false display of free space for non-admin users.

5

This definitely seems to be an issue; one user even reports file corruption:

discussions.apple.com/ (scroll down to user monkey078)

Here’s another instance:

reddit.com/r/MacOS/

So maybe you want to check

System Settings --> General --> Storage --> System Data

and see whether it’s endlessly Calculating…

Does this happen only if Apple Intelligence is turned off ?

6

Since I replaced my old 27" Retina iMac with an M2 Mac mini I find that the Finder number for free space is usually high by over 200 G bytes though randomly it shows the “correct” value. As far as I can tell the difference is solely due to com.apple.BKAgentService where I have over 200 G bytes of audio books. I have experimented with removing this folder and then the free space numbers remain relatively consistent between different sources.
I regularly copy data folders to a backup external drive. This frequently spends minutes “calculating” folder sizes although simply moving the cursor over the folder and tapping the space bar quickly shows the size.
Maybe Apple just assumes we all have far more disk space than we need so it isn’t important?
All the software on my machine is up to date.
There was a long discussion on this topic a year ago on TidBits.

7

As I say in this article:

Unless you’re simply curious, don’t waste time and mental energy trying to determine why deleting files or snapshots doesn’t free up the amount of space you think it should. macOS has become more complex than in past years, and the numbers no longer add up.