Size of /Users folder is way too low, where is my data?

My client called me because she had spilled some water on her MacBook Pro Retina.

We did all the standard things: turned it off, unplugged it, turned it upside down, etc.

She brought it to me and I'm having a look. I have little faith that the keyboard/logic board will be ok, but I had no reason to believe the SSD would be a problem.

I plugged the SSD into my external enclosure, attached it to my Mac and voilà! "Macintosh HD" (999.33 GB) appeared on my desktop. Yay! I open it up and I see this:

But....Users folder is only 32.2 MB?! This computer was in active use, so Family Photos, Mail, Documents, etc.

So, then I looked at the Get Info for the disk:

This makes no sense to me. Until now, my belief was that either the SSD would be unmountable or it would be 100% fine.

This is clearly somewhere in between.

Has anyone else encountered this? If so, was anyone able to retrieve data?

Solution 1:

Finder is probably just counting the /Users/Shared folder or other public folders. You probably don't have permission to the folders containing data for the user, so even though the data is there, Finder can't enumerate it to calculate the size. All you need to do is navigate within the Users folder and give yourself permission to the inaccessible folders (e.g. Documents) with Get Info.