Resolved Hard drive total used space - how to free it up?

[AxisOfBeagles]

Mystified as to the total drive space used on my late 2012 27" iMac (Catalina). Recently reorganised such that my rather large photo and video assets are all on external drives. Cleaned up the main HD, emptied the trash, even ran a disk cleaner to remove any artefacts. However, my 3 TB HD shows 2.31 TB used, 676 available. On that drive are 4 folders - Applications, Library, System, and Users. Those 4 total only 182 GB (53, 11, 16, and 182 used respectively). Leaving over 2 TB of "used" drive space unaccounted for. Short of reformatting and restoring, is there anything I can do to free that space up?

 

[AxisOfBeagles]

Quick addendum to make this 'mystery' more apparent ... "Get Info" on my Mac HD shows 2.31TB used. Same with Disk Utility. But "About This Mac", "Storage" seems to show the correct 2.81 TB available. Have tried First Aid, tried disk cleaner - all to no avail. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, would like to hear them

 

[AxisOfBeagles]

Never mind. After two days of multiple restarts it is now showing the correct "free space".

 

[snowyjoey]

I have this same problem and would love a solution if anyone has one?
I have 2 user accounts on my iMac. They are mostly dupes of each other so I deleted the entire Photos Library from one account (500GB of data!) yet the GetInfo on main HDD shows not just no less space used, it shows MORE?!