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neorgnaic

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 10, 2021
8
0
I've been having this issue for quite some time now (close to a year), wherein every so often, for reasons I can't identify, roughly 1-1.5 GB would just vanish from my available space, but it would stop there. Upon resetting, I would get the space back, but that's hardly a permanent solution. Also worth mentioning, this current Mac is brand new. It's a 2017 model, but it's fresh out of the box. Was having this same problem with the previous one, and the issue appears to have carried over with the data migration. This would suggest to me it's not a hardware problem, but something somewhere in my files/settings/etc. But I may be wrong obviously.

Now, however, the space is just slowly draining, at like 10MB every few seconds. So far I'm down about almost 6 GB in about 5-10 minutes. And this is happening with no apps open (except Safari right, now, obviously, but this was happening before I got on here).

Weirdly, though, I'm not noticing any performance issues.

Anyone have any idea what the problem is?
 
I had something similar some time back. Ended up being cached Time Machine backups.
 
Download DiskWave from here:
It's small in size and free.

Open DiskWave and go to the preferences.
Put a checkmark in "show invisible files".
Close preferences.

The DiskWave window shows you all your volumes and drives in plain English (no ridiculous graphical formats).
Click on any item "on the left".
Now, you'll see what's ON the volume, listed in order of "largest to smallest".
You can easily locate what's eating up your space.

What is it?
 
Last edited:
Download DiskWave from here:
It's small in size and free.

Open DiskWave and go to the preferences.
Put a checkmark in "show invisible files".
Close preferences.

The DiskWave window shows you all your volumes and drives in plain English (no ridiculous graphical formats).
Click on any item "on the left".
Now, you'll see what's ON the volume, listed in order of "largest to smallest".
You can easily locate what's eating up your space.

What is it?
This is nice but the only issue is, at least for the time being, the tide seems to have stemmed and I'm not actively losing any more space, so I don't know how big some of these files and folders were yesterday. But I'll keep an eye on it, thank you.

Is there a program like this that I can sort by date modified or something like it?
 
Update: all the space that disappeared a month ago suddenly and inexplicably returned, and then immediately started depleting again, and then stopped roughly around where it was before (at least for now).

I had DiskWave and DaisyDisk open throughout this, and while DiskWave didn't reveal anything useful, DaisyDisk showed all this space was coming and going via some hidden space that I obviously can't precisely locate (and that's even after having bought the upgraded version of DaisyDisk).

Does this information help shed any light on what's happened? 'cause I'm still at a loss.
 
OP:

When you used DiskWave, did you open its preferences and check the option to show INVISIBLE files???
 
Yes I did. Obviously it's possible I simply missed something, but I was going through every folder as it was happening and didn't notice it.
 
Another update: once again watching disk space disappear, this time without recovering the lost space initially. Currently have lost a bit over 10GB and still counting in the last ~10 minutes. DiskWave doesn't show anything, and DaisyDisk shows I've now got 20GB (again, and counting) of hidden space.

Edit: It stopped after about 12GB.
 
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