


A view window shows the contents in colorful rectangle blocks. Upon launch, it asks you to select a folder or drive you want to analyze. GrandPerspective is a utility app that uses a treemap structure for visualizing disk space. Now that you know why we recommend you use third-party apps, let's explore the best Mac disk space analyzers to inspect and analyze disk space. If your startup disk consists of at least four separate volumes, you might notice a reduction in space available to Macintosh HD.

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In APFS, every disk is a container that can hold multiple volumes and shares the same pool of free space. As a result, it may show the System category taking a lot of space. But neither Finder or About This Mac shows the space taken by snapshots. When Time Machine creates local snapshots, the file system is aware of the changes. The APFS snapshot feature works differently. Finder does not understand this mechanism and wrongly estimates free and used disk space. Instead of duplicating the data, it updates the metadata, and the on-disk data gets shared. Your Mac's file system, APFS, uses space-efficient clones while copying a file within the same volume.Although hard links take no actual disk space, Finder counts them (at least) twice as distinct files, resulting in inaccurate estimation of folder sizes. Why would you use a third-party app when there are multiple built-in ways to check the disk space on your Mac? Here are some reasons:įinder might incorrectly interpret hard links as another copy of the file. Why You Should Use a Mac Disk Space Analyzer
