Why is the disk storage in the finder this different than the one in disk utlity? Whats goin on here? The difference is unreal
Running Tahoe 26.2 on iMac 21 24". I have 9 user profiles on this machine, I checked for file purging but one thing I have to say is that all my other 19 iMacs running Sequoia + the same 9 user profiles aren't in this situation.. Thanks in advance
[Edited by Moderator]
iMac (M1, 2021)
The storage display in Finder is akin to a "guesstimate" and not to be relied on for accuracy.
The only accurate response will come from Disk Utility and Terminal.
I don't know why Finder is so poor at it, but it is.
to see what Finder can see inside Disk Utility, click on the item named DATA.
The display of DATA will not show the System snapshot and a few other overhead items.
it will show the same available space, because Apple File System shares space across all items in a volume Group.
The app in the background behind Disk Utility is not the Finder, but the Storage Management section of System Settings app. The information in the Storage Management tends to be incorrect for a number of reasons. Plus the System Management breakdown of storage & identifiers has different meanings than Disk Utility or even the Finder itself.
The categories in the Storage Management area such as Applications and Documents do not mean items just in the "Applications" or "Documents" folders, but any item on your Mac which can be considered an executable (aka application) or a document type file.
FYI, the only important & reliable storage value is the Free storage space value shown only in Disk Utility & the System Profiler. The "Available" storage value shown every where within macOS is very misleading and is not synonymous with Free. Even the Used storage value can be misleading under certain conditions due to how the APFS file system works.
Sometimes the Finder "Get Info" may provide you with the Available & Purgeable values, when it does you can calculate the Free space value:
Free space = Available space - Purgeable space
good as long as it doesn't actively interfere with my activities
Finder only knows about Mounted Volumes.
It can't know about Volume Groups and other items on the Drive that are not the Mounted Volume.
Can you explain me this thing? I didn't understand it. The mounted volume you see is the one I'm using I have no other stuff on the iMac that's it. if I go on "data" the numbers are the same
so I'm good? 😭
Disk storage in Finder different from Disk Utility on iMac?
