Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

strandclimber

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 12, 2014
5
0
Aloha everyone. I have a mid 2012 MBP retina. Here is my problem. When I look in my "About this mac" I have 165.65 GB free out of 250.14. So its saying that I am using 84.49 GB. 41.61 GB is in that mysterious "other" category. When I run omni disk sweep or disk wave, they say pretty much the same thing in the summary areas, which is to say that i'm using around 85 GB.....but when I look through all my files with either omni disk or disk wave, and add up what is there to see, my total used space is only around 42 GB. Soooo what is taking up the other 40 something GB of space? Can anyone help?
 
You probably have Time Machine turned on and that creates local snapshots that are nor counted in the total shown in Finder and some apps.

If you turn Time Machine off for a minute then turn it back on it will erase that space and the amounts should then match.
 
Thanks for the idea, but that's not it. I have time machine turned off, and I regularly back up my machine to a hard drive. I tried that again anyway, but not luck. Anyone else have any ideas what this is? It's driving me crazy!:mad:
 
Thanks for the idea, but that's not it. I have time machine turned off, and I regularly back up my machine to a hard drive. I tried that again anyway, but not luck. Anyone else have any ideas what this is? It's driving me crazy!:mad:

Run the command below in Terminal and post up the output. This will list all your base folders with the space used in GB, plus a total. It takes a couple minutes to complete and you will be prompted for your admin password.

Code:
sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /
 
Thank you so much! I found 34 GB in my .mobilebackups.trash! I tried to get rid of them by using the sudo mv /.MobileBackups.trash /Trashme command and then trashing the folder created. Most of the files are gone now, but some of them won't let me delete them. The trash says they are in use. I've tried to reboot and then empty the trash, but It won't let me. Also, how can I prevent this from happening in the future? Thanks again!:)
 
Thank you so much! I found 34 GB in my .mobilebackups.trash! I tried to get rid of them by using the sudo mv /.MobileBackups.trash /Trashme command and then trashing the folder created. Most of the files are gone now, but some of them won't let me delete them. The trash says they are in use. I've tried to reboot and then empty the trash, but It won't let me. Also, how can I prevent this from happening in the future? Thanks again!:)

Looks like you did have Time Machine on at some point. When you turn TM off, that hidden folder is where the local snapshots I mentioned get dumped, then later deleted. Looks like yours got hung up.

Follow the steps in my post here to kill it.

Do you use Crashplan by any chance? I had a Crahsplan background app update cause this issue for me. Others here have reported the same problem with Crahsplan.
 
Yes I do have crashplan. Is there a way I can fix this issue? Or do I just have to periodically do this as maintenance.
 
Yes I do have crashplan. Is there a way I can fix this issue? Or do I just have to periodically do this as maintenance.

Interesting.

Since you have TM tuned off, this won't happen again.

What happened was Crashplan updated their app in the background and the deleted files from the old app went into the /.Mobilebackups folder. Then when you turned off TM, the files went to the /.MobileBackups.trash where they would normally be deleted after a minute or two. Because of a bug in the way Crashplan updated their app, these files showed as still being in use and could not be deleted. This caused the entire contents of /.MobileBackups.trash to lock up and not delete.

Even if you did have TM on, this would potentially only happen again if Crashplan updated their app in the background again. After this happened to me, I filed a bug report with Crashplan and emailed back and forth on this. They told me they had forwarded the info. to their engineers to fix the issue, so hopefully if they do update their app in the background again they have fixed the bug. Who knows.

I suspect part of the problem is the Crashplan app is a Java app. Crahsplan has been promising a "native" OS X app since October 2012, and here we are almost two years later with no native app. I gave up and dumped Crashplan.
 
Thank you so much for the help! Problem fixed...finally! Out of curiosity, what backup service do you use now?
 
Thank you so much for the help! Problem fixed...finally! Out of curiosity, what backup service do you use now?

Glad that helped. :)

I am using the app Arq to backup up to Amazon S3. Very happy with this setup.

Arq can also backup to Google Drive, so if you don't have a lot of data you can backup 15GB to Google Drive with no fees.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.