High Sierra System Files eating up 400gb of space ... what gives??

[FredT2]

I don't use Time Machine. Users and Photos are about right.

 

[zlloyd1]

Try running the command below in Terminal and tell us the output.

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

Did it, and this came out....
1 /.abackblaze
1 /.bzvol
223 /.cleverfiles
1 /.DocumentRevisions-V100
1 /.fseventsd
0 /.PKInstallSandboxManager
1 /.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware
1 /.Spotlight-V100
0 /.Trashes
0 /.vol
ech120 /Applications
o1 /bin
0 /cores
1 /dev
1 /Developer
1 /home

Not certain what this means, but my System is taking up closer to 620gb this morning.
I am getting sick of Macintrash now, and am starting to feel like I have to be a computer programmer to use a Macos, so I almost wish I had a Windows machine that actually had a competent file system!!

 

[Weaselboy]

I don't use Time Machine. Users and Photos are about right.

Try running this in Terminal to reindex Spotlight. That is where that space used data comes from, and if the index is corrupted it can cause this. Give it 20-30 minutes to complete.

sudo mdutil -E /

223 /.cleverfiles

You have something here using 223GB of space in a hidden folder. It looks like recovered data from when you ran Disk Drill?

If you don't want the data, you can delete the folder with this command.

sudo rm -rf /.cleverfiles

It also looks like you did not wait long enough for the command to finish.

 

[FredT2]

Try running this in Terminal to reindex Spotlight. That is where that space used data comes from, and if the index is corrupted it can cause this. Give it 20-30 minutes to complete.

sudo mdutil -E /

That didn't work. I decided to give fsck a try, but booting in single user mode I never get the root prompt to enter the command. It's an iMac Pro.

I ran a CCC backup before trying the fsck, and it didn't copy the extra space. It's starting to look like I'll need to do a wipe and reinstall.

Update: A simple OS reinstall fixed it. I didn't have to wipe the drive thankfully.

 

[MIKX]

Don't use iCloud

By the way, iPhoto 9.6.1 works in High Sierra 10.13.6 = I don't like Photos.

 

[CynicMike]

I had same issue and think I have found a fix, after a month of going back and forth with Apple support. The problem was that no matter how much data I deleted from my Macbook pro hard drive, the available space did not drop by nearly as much (e.g. I deleted a folder containing 250 Gb of data and the available hard drive space only went up from 20 Mb to 14.5 Gb). Then the available hard drive space slowly drops until again I have only MB available. My system folder size kept rising from 300 gb to over 700 Gb (found by checking 'about this Mac, storage, manage) eventually, even though when checking hard drive contents (using DaisyDisk, Grand perspective etc) they listed System folder size as only 8 Gb. As a result my MacBook Pro has been unusable - I get constant messages about lack of available space and not even enough space to re-install a new version of High Sierra.
If you have Carbon Copy Cloner installed on APFS volume formatted disk, might be the Carbon Copy Cloner snapshot feature. Even though I had snapshot collection turned off, when I went into CCC and checked the disk involved (my macbook pro) by checking on this volume (bottom left pane) and then going to snapshots (top right pane) there was a single snapshot listed, with a file size of only MBs (my system folder size had bloated to over 700 Gb). The date of this snapshot was around the time that I first noticed this problem (5 weeks ago!!). I deleted it, said there was a problem, deleted again and miraculously I now have 686Gb free space!! I did this by having the MacBook pro mounted in target disk mode on my iMac. Not sure whether you would be able to do directly from within CCC on the problem drive.

 

[tri-x]

I did this by having the MacBook pro mounted in target disk mode on my iMac. Not sure whether you would be able to do directly from within CCC on the problem drive.

Thank you so much. This solved my free space issue. I would trash GBs of files and nothing would budge. Finally turned this off from within CCC and deleted ALL the snapshots. There were about a dozen, at most a few hundred MBs each, but deleting them restored about 100GB of free space on the computer.

 

[CynicMike]

Thank you so much. This solved my free space issue. I would trash GBs of files and nothing would budge. Finally turned this off from within CCC and deleted ALL the snapshots. There were about a dozen, at most a few hundred MBs each, but deleting them restored about 100GB of free space on the computer.

So glad it worked! There are also occasionally issues with Time Machine snapshots clogging up the system folder, as I have discovered.

 

[Mundo9]

I would use a couple of terminal commands.

I would start with:

df

Filesystem    512-blocks      Used Available Capacity iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on

/dev/disk1     487882752 193737536 293633216    40% 1519531 4293447748    0%   /
devfs                363       363         0   100%     628          0  100%   /dev
map -hosts             0         0         0   100%       0          0  100%   /net
map auto_home          0         0         0   100%       0          0  100%   /home

The second phase is a detailed report. As an admin user:

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

1    /.DocumentRevisions-V100
1    /.fseventsd
0    /.PKInstallSandboxManager-SystemSoftware
2    /.Spotlight-V100
0    /.vol
9    /Applications
1    /bin
0    /cores
1    /dev
1    /home
4    /Library
1    /net
0    /Network
7    /private
1    /sbin
10    /System
73    /Users
1    /usr
1    /Volumes
104    /
104    total

From here I can drill down looking at suspicious locations. For example, replace the / with /Users.

DS

[doublepost=1552417051][/doublepost]Hello. I have been looking in vain to find the terminal command(s) to erase the cores. They keep coming up with more and more 3gb cores. This has been happening for the last six month and I had a source from a discussion thread where someone laid out the commands but like a not smart person I just figured I could Google it again if needed again. Those commands would be appreciated.

 

[Takeapunt]

I had same issue and think I have found a fix…

This solved it for me too. I had been using an old version of CCC. Installed the new version, and even though snapshots were turned off, there was a 355GB snapshot there (as well as the expected local TM backups). Deleted the CCC one, and my 400+GB system is now 40GB. Thanks CynicMike.

 

[Hoegge]

Thanks for the tip. I also hav CCC installed - new version 5, though. After opening CCC and turning snapshots on and off the disk was freed up. Still a bit strange, though.

This solved it for me too. I had been using an old version of CCC. Installed the new version, and even though snapshots were turned off, there was a 355GB snapshot there (as well as the expected local TM backups). Deleted the CCC one, and my 400+GB system is now 40GB. Thanks CynicMike.

 

[HeadphoneAddict]

Could not for the life of me figure out where over 200 GB of missing space was sitting after deleting at least that much in files.

CCC had 2 snapshots from the past week (TM snapshots, since CCC was turned off) that said one was 0 MB and the other was 865 MB, but after deleting them I got back 215 GB of space.