disk space not being reclaimed

When I first log in to my mac, the bottom of the finder window shows 28.7 GB available

As soon as I interact with the finder, that changes to 417.35 GB available

About this mac > Storage shows 417.35GB out of 751.07GB

However, in the terminal df shows:

Filesystem    512-blocks       Used Available Capacity iused               ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1  1466930136 1408631896  54750856    97% 2915208 9223372036851860599    0%   
devfs                368        368         0   100%     638                   0  100%   /dev
/dev/disk1s4  1466930136    2097200  54750856     4%       1 9223372036854775806    0%   
/private/var/vm
map -hosts             0          0         0   100%       0                   0  100%   /net
map auto_home          0          0         0   100%       0                   0  100%   /home
/dev/disk0s1      403218      25912    377306     7%       0                   0  100%   
/Volumes/firmwaresyncd.UxqR5T

Omnisweeper shows 28.7 GB free, 720.6 GB used, 751.1 GB total

When I am working with certain applications in the terminal, I get errors/warnings about disk space being too low...

I tried booting into safe mode, and the progress bar got to 95% and sat there for... 20 minutes.. I eventually gave up trying to boot into safe mode.

Is there anything I can do to solve this other than formatting my drive and starting over?

I am running Mojave 10.14.3 (18D109) on a mac pro Retina, 13-inch, Late 2012.

Solution 1:

My solution was to create a 415GB file and then delete it. Now everything is working fine.