Help freeing up space?!

[Bulldog VII]

Hi all

I have a hard drive with all my media on, but for some unknown reason my HD is showing as having nearly 100GB on the hard drive

How do I see what this is?

Thanks

 

[rm5]

You have WAY more than 100 GB on that hard drive. In fact, you only have around 50 GB of free storage.

There's a neat tool that I like to use called ncdu which is installed via brew. If you run cd / && ncdu, you can see everything that's on your drive and the storage it's taking up. You can also delete any file, provided you have permission to delete it.

Do you have Homebrew (brew) installed? If not, I'd install it and then run brew install ncdu.

Of course, there are other tools that will work just as well, but I've found that going in manually with ncdu and really digging through the hard drive, there are often times a bunch of caches, etc., that you really don't need.

I also noticed that a good amount of your storage is consumed by "iOS files," which are iPhone/iPad backups. If you delete those, then you'll free up a good amount of storage. Also, delete all those downloaded movies and TV shows (TV), and clean out your desktop, documents, and downloads folders (Documents).

By the way (and I think this goes without saying), I REALLY hope you're backing up your Mac with Time Machine (or similar)!!

 

[Dave Braine]

Download Grandperspectiv. It shows what you've got and how much space it's taking up.

GrandPerspective

grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

 

[Ben J.]

I use Daisydisk.

 

[Bulldog VII]

You have WAY more than 100 GB on that hard drive. In fact, you only have around 50 GB of free storage.

There's a neat tool that I like to use called ncdu which is installed via brew. If you run cd / && ncdu, you can see everything that's on your drive and the storage it's taking up. You can also delete any file, provided you have permission to delete it.

Do you have Homebrew (brew) installed? If not, I'd install it and then run brew install ncdu.

Of course, there are other tools that will work just as well, but I've found that going in manually with ncdu and really digging through the hard drive, there are often times a bunch of caches, etc., that you really don't need.

I also noticed that a good amount of your storage is consumed by "iOS files," which are iPhone/iPad backups. If you delete those, then you'll free up a good amount of storage. Also, delete all those downloaded movies and TV shows (TV), and clean out your desktop, documents, and downloads folders (Documents).

By the way (and I think this goes without saying), I REALLY hope you're backing up your Mac with Time Machine (or similar)!!

Yes I back up onto another HD, I wasn't clear in my original message. I have an 8TB HD with all my media on but the 500GB HD on my Imac is showing as 100GB to TV? I've gone through & check the location of my recent added films & music & they are shown as being on the external HD? I want to know how I can look on my imacs HD to see what is the actual content of the 100Gig on the iMac HD.... does that make sense?

 

[Fishrrman]

Download DiskWave from here:

DiskWave Homepage

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?

 

[Bulldog VII]

Download DiskWave from here:

DiskWave Homepage

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?

Thanks, I can't see preferences as an option?

 

[Ben J.]

System requirements
DiskWave requires Mac OS X 10.6 and a 64 bit Intel CPU minimum.
DiskWave fully supports Mac OS X 10.10 Mavericks.

Copyright © 2009-2016 Aymeric Barthe.

DiskWave v. 0.4.0

I'm not saying it won't work, just I wouldn't really trust it on a modern mac/macOS.

 

[Fishrrman]

"I'm not saying it won't work, just I wouldn't really trust it on a modern mac/macOS."

DiskWave works JUST FINE on my 2021 MacBook Pro 14" running Monterey.

I can't speak for how it works with Ventura.
Edit: I checked using my experimental Ventura drive, and it seems to work there, too.

As for accessing "preferences" -- works like any other app. Just go to the "DiskWave" menu in the menu bar, and choose "preferences"...