How is 'Apps' storage is 300gb & 'Users' is 621gb on 500gb Mac? Help!

[TechAdjacent]

Hi guys,

My storage keeps fluctuating on its own, sometimes I have 40gb free, next minute 5gb. My Mac says I have used over 300gb storage in Apps. Since I can't find out why this has happened I was hoping you could suggest what is going on.

When I look at the 'Manage' section in Storage it shows the biggest app is 2.92gb, I also went to Library but it populates as 21.5gb.

Exploring further in this mystery I got to the 'Users' file and found it to be 621gb - my Mac has 500gb total storage. Not sure how this is happening to be honest - I am the only user on this computer.

If anyone can suggest anything to help or knows what is going on I would greatly appreciate it

MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2019)
1.6GHz Gual-Core Intel Core i5
500 GB Storage
16GB Memory

 

[kitenski]

Take a look at your Cloud storage like Dropbox and iCloud

 

[Abazigal]

@TechAdjacent You could try using an app like Omnidisksweeper to try and ferret out if there are any stray files hogging space on your hard drive.

 

[jdb8167]

It's a complicated question. APFS does a lot of things to maximize storage. You can read about some of it here:

Where did all that free space go on my APFS disk

And this one too:

Free space on an APFS volume is an illusion