"other users"

[J Burns]

Today my free space was unusually low. I put 2 gb of files in the trash
and emptied it. A Finder window may not show changes immediately, but
Storage in About this Mac showed that I'd gained 2 gb.

I put another gb in the trash and emptied it. This time. About this Mac
showed no increase. I put 2 more gb in the trash and emptied it. Still
no increase in free space.

If I click "Manage Storage" the category Other Users has 3 gb. What is
"Other Users?"

[Ant]

Do you have other macOS accounts in that Mac?
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[J Burns]

On 4/17/23 1:17 AM, Ant wrote:
> J Burns <bu...@nospam.com> wrote:
>> Today my free space was unusually low. I put 2 gb of files in the trash
>> and emptied it. A Finder window may not show changes immediately, but
>> Storage in About this Mac showed that I'd gained 2 gb.
>
>> I put another gb in the trash and emptied it. This time. About this Mac
>> showed no increase. I put 2 more gb in the trash and emptied it. Still
>> no increase in free space.
>
>> If I click "Manage Storage" the category Other Users has 3 gb. What is
>> "Other Users?"
>
> Do you have other macOS accounts in that Mac?

In System Settings, there's a default "Guest User," but it's switched
off and I haven't used it.

Yesterday, I put another 350mB file in the trash and emptied it, and in
About This Mac, the available space jumped by more than 6 gB. The space
listed in a finder window, and that in Get Info for my disk, remained
the same as before. Later, I saw that they had jumped more than 6 gB, to
be the same as About this Mac showed.

Today, they three are the same, but they've dropped 10 gB overnight, to
where they were yesterday. I haven't downloaded anything big.

[J Burns]

On 4/17/23 6:09 PM, J Burns wrote:

>
> Today, they three are the same, but they've dropped 10 gB overnight, to
> where they were yesterday. I haven't downloaded anything big.

I took a snapshot of the Storage categories. Fifteen minutes later,
available space had dropped another 5 gB! I pulled up Storage
catagories. System Data had jumped 5 gB.

Is this normal? I haven't seen it before.

[J Burns]

On 4/18/23 2:43 AM, Alan B wrote:
> J Burns <bu...@nospam.com> wrote:

> Howard Oakley has written a series of articles about Finder anomalies
> recently on his blog site. You may find some of his thoughts relevant to
> your situation.
>
> <https://eclecticlight.co>
>
Thanks. Now when I check Storage Settings, it's perpetually trying to
calculate Photos and System Data.

Would reinstalling the system fix it? I hope the problem isn't at a
lower level.

[J Burns]

> I guess there are several other things to try first from just a restart to
> running disk first aid in recovery mode. I’m not sure reinstalling macOS
> will sort this out but it’s worth trying.
>
Suddenly, Finder windows were showing more free space than I've ever
seen. It has dropped 20 gB overnight.

In "Storage," System Data had dropped to 1 gB. It soon rose. Now it's 13
gB. Maybe it means snapshots. I don't know when snapshots are made and
when they are deleted.

Maybe it's normal functioning with Venture 13.3.

[Alan B]

Time Machine snapshots get auto deleted over time or if macOS detects the
system is running low on disk space. You can manually delete them too.

--
Cheers, Alan

[Alan]

That may be so...

...but I agree that the reporting of storage on macOS at the moment is
totally screwed up.

Finder reports: "Available: 44.79 GB (22.88 GB purgeable)"
About this Mac: "45.34 GB available of 500.07 GB"
Disk Utility...

...well frankly, it's way too hard to parse WHAT it's reporting.