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Losing SSD space for no reason

J

Jonny Craig

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 9, 2012
10
0
When I look at my storage space it will randomly drop throughout the day. A few hours ago it was at 76.9 and now it's at 76.82 and I haven't downloaded anything. Just been using Safari.

What could be causing this? Even though it's not a lot of space I'm losing won't it accrue over time and become a problem?
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
Do you have Time Machine turned on? It creates temporary local backups that use some space.

Also, Safari creates a "cache" of web sites you have browsed, so just normal browsing will eat up some space like that.
 
M

moral-hazard

macrumors regular
Jul 27, 2009
197
3
Weaselboy said:
Do you have Time Machine turned on? It creates temporary local backups that use some space.

Also, Safari creates a "cache" of web sites you have browsed, so just normal browsing will eat up some space like that.
Click to expand...

Opening a terminal and running the following command will turn off the local backups:

sudo tmutil disablelocal
Click to expand...

If you don't do that, your machine will basically fill up all of its free disk space. I'd recommend turning off local backups and using an external disk to make your time machine backups.

----------

Also of note, the amount of space you saw disappearing is pretty minimal. Even if you aren't "doing" much of anything on the machine, programs may be writing to the disk. I wouldn't consider this to be a problem unless the free space decreases more significantly.
 
Weaselboy

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,133
15,596
California
moral-hazard said:
Opening a terminal and running the following command will turn off the local backups:

If you don't do that, your machine will basically fill up all of its free disk space. I'd recommend turning off local backups and using an external disk to make your time machine backups.
Click to expand...

There really is no need to turn it off. If the space used by local backups is needed by the user, OS X will shrink the local backup space on its own.

It can be a useful feature for restoring accidentally deleted data when away from a Time Machine drive.

You can turn Time Machine off then back on to zero out the space if you want.
 
J

Jonny Craig

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 9, 2012
10
0
Very strange, turned my computer off last night and turned it on this morning and now I have 77.24 GB. So somehow I gained space :confused:

Also time machine is turned off
 
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