HARD TO SOLVE - User account free space and HD free space do not match

Question

Hello.
I just upgraded my iMac from a 320Gb to a 1Tb, so as to have more space (obviously). The APR did install the HD since I did not want to mess myself with the hardware (I'm clumsy). I then reset the data via TimeMachine since all my files are in a filevault protected account.
I now have a problem they cannot solve. My user account (there's only one account on the whole computer, let's call it XYZ) is protected by filevault. In the user account XYZ there are only about 100Gb of space left, whereas the LocalHD clearly shows that there are more than 475Gb left on the LocalHD. I cannot turn off filevault as it keeps saying that I am missing about 370Gb of free space to turn off filevault.
And I need more space in my user account XYZ for various reasons, one of them being synchronisation over internet et caetera. Does anyone have a solution which does not consist in moving every single file manually to a new user account?
My guess was that the filevault account XYZ is limited by size since it comes from the old HD which was only 320Gb, but even that makes no solution, as it occupies a lot more than 320Gb at this point (my iTunes lib is bigger). As I said, the Luxembourg APR have no idea how to solve this issue, I would be more than glad if one of you had a solution to trick the filevault account XYZ into believing it had more space allocated (I'm not that used to the terminal, it may be the key to the problem).
Thank you so much in advance,
Laurent

Answer 1

Hi,
My guess was that the filevault account XYZ is limited by size since it comes from
the old HD which was only 320Gb,
Yes, I think this is what happened - see
*Mac OS X: FileVault-protected Home shows less capacity than what's available on the hard disk*
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24068
but even that makes no solution, as it occupies a lot more than 320Gb at this
point (my iTunes lib is bigger).
At least in Snow Leopard, when you create a FileVault account the "potential capacity" of the FileVault volume contained in the sparsebundle is twice the size of the underlying HD! Obviously that capacity could never be realized, since the sparsebundle could not grow larger than the HD that contains it. So for example, my startup HD volume capacity is 320GB. If I create a test Filevault account named "fv" and Get Info on the FileVault mounted volume (the icon in the sidebar), it shows an apparent capacity of 640GB! The reported Used space is apparently artificially inflated so as to make the actual available space seem correct:
The normal fix for your situation is to turn off Filevault and then optionally turn it on again, but you currently don't have enough free space on the HD to do this. The FileVault sparsebundle is supposed to self-compact when you log out of FileVault, and so compacting it manually may not help. If you do try this via a Terminal command, I think you will have to do it as root - I could not directly access a FileVault sparsebundle from a different admin account.
The support article above suggests:
If you do not have sufficient free space on your hard disk, you will need to temporarily reduce the size of your home directory, for example by copying a large amount of data in your home directory to an external hard disk, then deleting the stuff that you moved from your Home. After copying, log out or restart so that FileVault can reclaim the unused space.
This seems safe, though time-consuming.
An alternative approach would be to try to directly resize the FileVault sparsebundle and its contained volume. This can apparently be done, but is obviously risky since if something goes wrong you could easily lose everything in the Filevault account. I did some experimenting and was able to increase the size of my test FileVault home volume to 1T by logging out of the Filevault account, logging into a different admin account, and then using this Terminal command:
sudo hdiutil resize -size 1000g /Users/username/username.sparsebundle
Here <username> is the name of the FileVault account. I was asked first for the current logged-in admin account password (for the sudo) and then for the password to access the sparsebundle, which is the password for the FileVault account. This seemed to work (it took some time to complete), and I was then able to re-log into the Filevault account. The sidebar Filevault icon Get Info now showed a capacity of 1.07 TB.
But again, this seems risky - I can't recommend trying it except perhaps on a backup clone.
Message was edited by: jsd2