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Help figuring out why I'm running out of storage on a 27" iMac?

I

Imola Ghost

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 21, 2009
1,153
12
I'm helping a friend and I'm a little lost with why there is almost NO storage left on their iMac with a terabyte hard drive.

I've ran a application call "omni disk sweeper" and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

If you go to "about this mac" click on storage there is a little over 700GB of data (in yellow) taking up space. I know they do some Time Machine backups but they use a external USB drive to back up everything. The total of the back up says that its almost 981gb of data!

However if you go to the "Macintosh HD" in the finder window there is nothing out of the ordinary that I can see. They have their music of about 150gb's, 70gb of his business documents/photos, 12gb's of photos, etc all of totaling 225.26GB which is exactly what omni disk sweeper came back with.

I'm thinking it may have something to do with them previously have Boot Camp and he MAY OR MAY NOT have deleted the partition correctly. But I went into Disk Utility and there isn't a Boot Camp partition any longer.

They also use to use Fusion to run Windows so they could run a version of Quickbooks for their business. I believe he deleted it but not sure how or what he did to remove it but its no longer being use and I only see some minor files or about 30gb for Fusion but that 30gb is included in that overall 225.26GB of total storage space I've found.

Something I'm missing or I don't know exactly what I'm doing but I cannot find where this data is.

Ideas or suggestions?
 
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Imola Ghost said:
I'm helping a friend and I'm a little lost with why there is almost NO storage left on their iMac with a terabyte hard drive.

I've ran a application call "omni disk sweeper" and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.

If you go to "about this mac" click on storage there is a little over 700GB of data (in yellow) taking up space. I know they do some Time Machine backups but they use a external USB drive to back up everything. The total of the back up says that its almost 981gb of data!

However if you go to the "Macintosh HD" in the finder window there is nothing out of the ordinary that I can see. They have their music of about 150gb's, 70gb of his business documents/photos, 12gb's of photos, etc all of totaling 225.26GB which is exactly what omni disk sweeper came back with.

I'm thinking it may have something to do with them previously have Boot Camp and he MAY OR MAY NOT have deleted the partition correctly.

They also use to use Fusion to run Windows so they could run a version of Quickbooks for their business. I believe he deleted it but not sure how or what he did to remove it but its no longer being use and I only see some minor files or about 30gb for Fusion but that 30gb is included in that overall 225.26GB of total storage space I've found.

Something I'm missing or I don't know exactly what I'm doing but I cannot find where this data is.

Ideas or suggestions?
Click to expand...


open terminal and type

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /

That will give a listing, post it here for help
 
I had to create another user because Macrumors was not letting me log in.

Anyways here's what came back from the Terminal window......



1 /.DocumentRevisions-V100
1 /.fseventsd
1 /.Spotlight-V100
0 /.Trashes
0 /.vol
14 /Applications
1 /bin
0 /cores
1 /dev
1 /home
6 /Library
1 /net
0 /Network
2 /private
1 /sbin
4 /System
890 /Users
1 /usr
1 /Volumes
1 /WindowsSupport
916 /
916 total


The "890" users is odd but not sure what all that means. I also ran this same terminal of my own computer and it came back with "46" users which seems odd because I only have 3, myself, my wife and guest. Just thought I'd let you know.
 
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The numbers are gigabytes. Now you know that /users is using 890 GB. You issue the same command again but have it search /Users and not /

Sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g /Users

This will add it up in Users. If your user name is using all the 890, then do it again with /Users/your_username

----------

I wanted you to check / first because failed time machine restores can end up in /Volumes.
 
Ok, I actually learned something...thanks to you.

We followed the information you provided and worked out way down the tree to find out that she has 657GB of data for her mail library.

So where do I find out what to delete in her mail account? I know she's a heavy email user because she's be working on getting a product patent and it has required unheard of requests.

But anyway what or how do I go about deleting or cleaning up the email library?
 
ibis ghost said:
Ok, I actually learned something...thanks to you.

We followed the information you provided and worked out way down the tree to find out that she has 657GB of data for her mail library.

So where do I find out what to delete in her mail account? I know she's a heavy email user because she's be working on getting a product patent and it has required unheard of requests.

But anyway what or how do I go about deleting or cleaning up the email library?
Click to expand...

Wow, that's big for email. Look in the attachments. I'm on an iPad watching moonshiners or I'd give you the full path.

I just looked and the folder structure is based on the IMAP accounts so yours will differ from mine. Maybe from Mail itself, you can go in and remove all junk mail, empty deleted folders, stuff like that to get it to a manageable size.

Here is a good article from lifehacker to get your mailbox under control

http://lifehacker.com/5841097/how-t...achments-in-apple-mail-and-free-up-disk-space
 
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