Storage space being eaten up

[Nightcrawler90]

Hi all,

I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro with a 250gb hard drive. Last week I backed up all stuff and did a clean install of OS X Mountain Lion. Once this had installed I had 232gb free.. Going off my finder, I am only using 53.52gb of my hard drive, but looking at disk utility I only have 35.16 GB available! Thats 160gb unaccounted for... I did use the command in terminal "write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES" to see if there were any hidden folders I was missing but still no luck. Has anyone else had this problem?

Also could someone suggest a decent disk cleaning utility to at least help me diagnose the problem. I have 'Disk Inventory X' but that has given me the same information as looking at finder and seeing only 53gb of files...

Any advice would be appreciated!

[GGJstudios]

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space

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 be consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.

  OS X: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

• Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
  
  
• Check the System Memory tab in Activity Monitor to check page outs and swap used. If swap used is significant, restart your computer and track that value under your normal workload. If you have significant page outs under normal use, you could benefit from more RAM.
  
  
• 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.

  

• 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:

• Encrypted drive
• Time Machine backup files and needed disk repair
• App filling log file
• App or file was 89GB
• Drive needed to be re-indexed
• Time Machine backup file
• Large app cache file
• Garageband files and video podcasts
• Oversized email being duplicated
• Another email issue

Freeing up space in Mac OS X

How OS X and iOS report storage capacity

[Nightcrawler90]

Take a look at the image below (didn't realise mountain lion had the capability to analyse disk allocation...)



It is reporting my backups are taking over my disk space.I have my mac backed up on a timecapsule already. How can I remove these back ups?

[GGJstudios]

Originally Posted by Nightcrawler90

It is reporting my backups are taking over my disk space.I have my mac backed up on a timecapsule already. How can I remove these back ups?

Read the 2nd bullet point in my post. When you disable them, they are removed automatically.

[Nightcrawler90]

Thanks, I have done this but now i have 160gb worth of 'other'.. I am currently going through the commands on from the first item on your post..

[Nightcrawler90]

This was the result from du -h -d1


unknown-00:25:00:3d:c7:df:~ rhysskachill-kelly$ du -h -d1
197M ./.dropbox
0B ./.Trash
764K ./Desktop
8.0K ./Documents
0B ./Downloads
93M ./Dropbox
4.3G ./Library
1.4G ./Movies
258M ./Music
378M ./Pictures
0B ./Public
24K ./Sites
6.6G .


And this is the result from sudo du -h -d1

1.9M ./.DocumentRevisions-V100
1.9M ./.fseventsd
213M ./.Spotlight-V100
0B ./.Trashes
0B ./.vol
9.1G ./Applications
2.7M ./bin
0B ./cores
4.5K ./dev
1.0K ./home
2.2G ./Library
1.0K ./net
0B ./Network
5.9G ./private
1.5M ./sbin
3.2G ./System
7.0G ./Users
365M ./usr
4.0K ./Volumes
28G .


There is nothing to indicate where this stray 160gb has disappeared to.. Each of the directories add up to what the 'about this mac' graphic tallied...

Hoping you have some other tricks up your sleeve?