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Yosemite Update Ate Up 160GB Off My Hard Drive

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donster28

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 5, 2006
1,726
811
Great White North
Hi folks, I've been a proficient Mac user for a while now but it bugs me that I cannot figure out what's eating 130 GB of my hard drive.

I checked all my files in the finder and I cannot find a single file (or a combination of files) that corresponds to the consumed disk space.

I have the latest version of Yosemite and my rMBP is a late-2013 base 15-inch.

Can anyone help me in pinpointing this culprit so I can delete it?

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE 1:
I have since re-formatted and re-installed Yosemite and I reclaimed my system back including the unknown occupied space. I have to correct my earlier posts and indicate that I actually lost 160+ GB instead of 130.

I have also investigated further and I noticed with my Time Machine back-up, a day before updating to the latest version of Yosemite, that I had the whole available disk space reported, leaving me to believe that the Yosemite update might have been the culprit. I will keep an eye on this the next time I update again and report back here.

I am updating the title of my thread to reflect what I found out, hoping to attract any who has encountered the same anomaly as I did.

This is the first time I encountered this with any Macs I ever owned. I have always found anything occupying my hard drives in the past by simply looking under Finder and sorting by file size.

UPDATE 2:
My rMBP seems to run a lot snappier after the fresh install. My re-occuring problems of accessing my Time Capsule drive have also been resolved...no more waiting forever for the Time Capsule drive to appear as an available drive, no more 'drive is not available' messages either.

I have always upgraded from a previous OS thinking that it can do no harm. I am now a believer of fresh installations!
 
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donster28 said:
Hi folks, I've been a proficient Mac user for a while now but it bugs me that I cannot figure out what's eating 130 GB of my hard drive.
Click to expand...
If you're wondering what "Other" category in the storage tab is about, this may help explain: For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:
  • Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
  • For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo tmutil disablelocal.
  • Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
  • Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
    attachment.php
  • Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
  • Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
  • Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes
Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question: Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X
 
GGJstudios said:
If you're wondering what "Other" category in the storage tab is about, this may help explain: For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply: Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question: Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X
Click to expand...

Thanks very much for the quick reply and for the resource. I'll try to see if I can resolve this by following a few of the steps you're recommending. :)
 
It's not really 'other' its more everything else

Apps, photos, music and video files of known types have their own categories

Everything else including any deleted items sat in trash (even if they're video audio or photos gets categorized as 'other' and lumped together

In my case I've got 68GB of 'other' sat on my boot drive and 40GB of that is four or five disk images for parallels

OSX itself gets categorized as 'other' which would be best part of another 10GB?

Then I've got 10Gb of miscelaneous pdf files, zip archives, a windows 8 iso file, documents, windows executables and a dmg or two
 
I have done checking my hard drive by following the advice of GGJstudios and I cannot find any files that total 130 GB.

I can understand 40 GB, but 130? :(
 
donster28 said:
I have done checking my hard drive by following the advice of GGJstudios and I cannot find any files that total 130 GB.

I can understand 40 GB, but 130? :(
Click to expand...
Did you check Time Machine snapshots? Did you run a few of the apps recommended to see how space is consumed on your drive? Did you check your drive with Disk Utility? Re-index Spotlight? Restart your computer?
 
The best tool to find it would be OmniDiskSweeper. DiskInventoryX will also help.
 
GGJstudios said:
Did you check Time Machine snapshots? Did you run a few of the apps recommended to see how space is consumed on your drive? Did you check your drive with Disk Utility? Re-index Spotlight? Restart your computer?
Click to expand...


I have done the above. I've also used OmniDiskSweeper and it was not showing me anything that make up the 130GB.

I am still baffled.
 
donster28 said:
I have done the above. I've also used OmniDiskSweeper and it was not showing me anything that make up the 130GB.
Click to expand...
Is that the only such app you tried? As I said earlier, some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
 
donster28 said:
I have done the above. I've also used OmniDiskSweeper and it was not showing me anything that make up the 130GB.

I am still baffled.
Click to expand...

If so, then the most likely reason now is that it does not exist. Perhaps the index is screwed up. Set Spotlight off to reindex your computer. Then you will have a more accurate graphic.
 
GGJstudios said:
Is that the only such app you tried? As I said earlier, some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
Click to expand...

I'll try the rest...thanks for still helping out. :)

----------
poiihy said:
If so, then the most likely reason now is that it does not exist. Perhaps the index is screwed up. Set Spotlight off to reindex your computer. Then you will have a more accurate graphic.
Click to expand...

I tried re-indexing to no avail. I will try it again just to make sure. Thanks for your advise. :)
 
GGJstudios said:
Is that the only such app you tried? As I said earlier, some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
Click to expand...

Tried all of them now and they still did not show me the space consumed. :(

I am contemplating re-installing Yosemite from scratch but if there is still anything you can advise me to do before I do that would be great.

PS. My Time Machine sparsebundle seems to also contain the 130 GB mystery space...if I restore from it after a fresh install, will I be back to the same problem?
 
donster28 said:
Tried all of them now and they still dis not show me the space consumed. :(

I am contemplating re-installing Yosemite from scratch but if there is still anything you can advise me to do before I do that would be great.
Click to expand...
I can tell you that over years of responding to issues like yours, I've added to that initial post. I haven't seen any such issues that weren't addressed by the contents of that post. You may want to run through the checklist again, making sure you didn't miss something, before you reinstall.
 
GGJstudios said:
I can tell you that over years of responding to issues like yours, I've added to that initial post. I haven't seen any such issues that weren't addressed by the contents of that post. You may want to run through the checklist again, making sure you didn't miss something, before you reinstall.
Click to expand...


Could this be a bug in Yosemite? I can tell you too that I haven't experienced this before until now. I was always able to pinpoint any file that consumed my hard drive.
 
donster28 said:
Could this be a bug in Yosemite? I can tell you too that I haven't experienced this before until now. I was always able to pinpoint any file that consumed my hard drive.
Click to expand...
Anything is possible, but I haven't heard of such a bug in Yosemite.
 
GGJstudios said:
Anything is possible, but I haven't heard of such a bug in Yosemite.
Click to expand...

Thanks again. If I can recall, I never really noticed this discrepancy until I updated Yosemite this afternoon.

I will probably just re-install Yosemite tomorrow. I've done everything you've suggested and double-checked the list to no avail. Yosemite has been slightly buggy on my machine since I upgraded and fresh installing might make it a little bit more stable. I also opted to upgrade from Mavericks instead of fresh installing so this might be part of the problem.

Again, thanks for trying to help out...I greatly appreciate it :)
 
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might be worth posting a screenshot of what Omnidisc shows for the root of your SSD?

mine is attached below (I've moved some stuff off the boot drive to see what gets counted as other)

mine shows 50.6GB thru the OmniDisc sweep, whereas About this mac shows 53.5GB used.

Where the 'missing' 3GB on my SSD that doesnt show up via Omnidisc gets accounted for? System (2.5GB under reported) and usr (0.4GB under reported)
 

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    About_This_Mac_and_Macintosh_SSD_-_50_6_GB.png
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snorkelman said:
might be worth posting a screenshot of what Omnidisc shows for the root of your SSD?

mine is attached below (I've moved some stuff off the boot drive to see what gets counted as other)

mine shows 50.6GB thru the OmniDisc sweep, whereas About this mac shows 53.5GB used.

Where the 'missing' 3GB on my SSD that doesnt show up via Omnidisc gets accounted for? System (2.5GB under reported) and usr (0.4GB under reported)
Click to expand...

On mine, OmnidiskSweeper doesn't show anything else not already shown in my finder. Plus, I'm looking for 130 GB which should be easy to spot, but all I see in OmniDiskSweeper and Finder are smaller files which don't even total 130 GB, not nearly.
 
I was going to suggest iphone and ipad backups along with ginormous amounts of phone and ipad apps being stored in itunes etc,

but if the declared space in the folders shown in that left hand pane of Omni disc bears no relation to what your drive is saying is used (ie dont add up to the 130GB plus you're looking for) then yes, definately sounds like some sort of glitch.
 
Try running a verify disk in disk utility. It's very possible that it's got the free space messed up and needs fixing. To fix it you'll need to boot into the recovery partition though.
 
snorkelman said:
I was going to suggest iphone and ipad backups along with ginormous amounts of phone and ipad apps being stored in itunes etc,

but if the declared space in the folders shown in that left hand pane of Omni disc bears no relation to what your drive is saying is used (ie dont add up to the 130GB plus you're looking for) then yes, definately sounds like some sort of glitch.
Click to expand...

I actually have my iTunes media on a separate drive (my Time Machine disk). I also check for any duplicates on my rMBP drive and all is good.

----------
email4nickp said:
Try running a verify disk in disk utility. It's very possible that it's got the free space messed up and needs fixing. To fix it you'll need to boot into the recovery partition though.
Click to expand...

I already did that from Disk Utility and by using 'Cocktail', still no resolve.
 
As snorkelman suggested, it would be useful if you could post a screenshot of:
a) About this Mac -> More Info -> Storage
b) DiscInventoryX (my preferred tool)
 
donster28 said:
Tried all of them now and they still did not show me the space consumed. :(
Click to expand...

Run the command below in Terminal and it will show the size of the base folders and space used in GB for each and that will help us pin this down for you. You will be asked for your password and it takes a couple minutes to run.

Post the results up here so we can take a look.

Code: 
sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

The output will look like this. This will show hidden and system folders that are not shown by any of those apps mentioned.

Code: 
1	/.DocumentRevisions-V100
1	/.fseventsd
0	/.PKInstallSandboxManager
1	/.Spotlight-V100
0	/.Trashes
0	/.vol
9	/Applications
1	/bin
0	/cores
1	/dev
1	/home
9	/Library
1	/net
0	/Network
3	/private
1	/sbin
5	/System
25	/Users
1	/usr
1	/Volumes
51	/
51	total
 
Second the recommendation for Disk Inventory X: it helps me figure out very quickly what is taking up extra space on my drive. Just yesterday, I moved a bunch of old archives over to my external backup drive and freed up about 10GB.

If you can't figure it out with Disk Inventory X, please post a screenshot.
 
Thank you all guys for the latest responses and advice.

Unfortunately, I have since re-formatted and re-installed Yosemite and I reclaimed my system back including the unknown occupied space. I have to correct my earlier posts and indicate that I actually lost 160+ GB instead of 130.

I have also investigated further and I noticed with my Time Machine back-up, a day before updating to the latest version of Yosemite, that I had the whole available disk space reported, leaving me to believe that the Yosemite update might have been the culprit. I will keep an eye on this the next time I update again and report back here.

I am updating the title of my thread to reflect what I found out, hoping to attract any who has encountered the same anomaly as I did.

This is the first time I encountered this with any Macs I ever owned. I have always found anything occupying my hard drives in the past by simply looking under Finder and sorting by file size.
 
Last edited:
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