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Can't find whats taking up all the space

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busterbluth

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 14, 2008
309
1
So my hard drive space went from 96gb to 54gb free.

I don't know what is taking up all the space.
I have a disk map application, and it says that i have used 133gb on my hard drive, but the totals for all the folders (entire hard drive) are 100 gb.

Anyone have any idea where this data may be?
 
From the terminal, try running "df -h". This will show you how much space each partition has allocated to it and how much is used. You can also try "du -h" to see how big each file is in the directory you are currently in.
 
Duff-Man says....this is a question that seems to come up with a new thread at least once a week. It's probably the local time machine backups/snapshots that the OS makes when not connected to the backup drive....are you using a macbook or macbook pro, or do you not keep your backup drive connected and/or turned on all the time?

Connecting the backup drive and initiating the backup session should free up the space, if it does't maybe a reboot too. The local backup option can be tuned off via terminal command (or by using a tool like Onyx if you happen to be terminal-shy)....oh yeah!
 
busterbluth said:
So my hard drive space went from 96gb to 54gb free.

I don't know what is taking up all the space.
I have a disk map application, and it says that i have used 133gb on my hard drive, but the totals for all the folders (entire hard drive) are 100 gb.

Anyone have any idea where this data may be?
Click to expand...

Like Duff-Man mentioned, you likely have Time Machine turned on and the space is used by Time Machine's local snapshots.

Run the command below in Terminal and it will show how much space is being used in this way. You can just ignore it and OS will start to delete files from here once your disk used space hits 80%. Or if you just turn Time Machine off then on again it will zero the space.

Code: 
sudo du -hs /.MobileBackups
 
Use Clean My Mac, I had this problem once when a Virtual Machine allocated space and when I deleted it the space still remained as "used".
 
I use this terminal command to disable the local TimeMachine backups
sudo tmutil disablelocal

That should give your space back
 
Duff-Man said:
It's probably the local time machine backups/snapshots that the OS makes when not connected to the backup drive
Click to expand...

Yes.

It's a wonnnnderful feature, btw, and nothing I'd recommend turning off. Recently I trashed/deleted something important (d'oh!) and, in desperation, entered Time Machine, even though I was thousands of miles and a week's travels away from my backups. And there was the file.

Simply wonderful. It's moments like that when I bow in gratitude to Cupertino.

Stories like that, my friends, is why I use a Mac. The little things. The very big, very wonderful little things.
 
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