I can't explain all of this [SSD almost full]

[petrucci666]

Ok, so I went from a 500GB 13" MBP to a 128GB MBA. No biggie since I'm using Rdio and Google Music for my cloud music entertainment, my movies and photos are on an external hard drive and that's pretty much it for the media.

But again, the storage is showing 15GB of music even though iTunes is empty, as well as 2.5 and 5.5GB of photos and movies. I don't have a single photograph or movie of my own on this machine and it is still showing me this.

What gives?

 

[Tortri]

Ok, so I went from a 500GB 13" MBP to a 128GB MBA. No biggie since I'm using Rdio and Google Music for my cloud music entertainment, my movies and photos are on an external hard drive and that's pretty much it for the media.

But again, the storage is showing 15GB of music even though iTunes is empty, as well as 2.5 and 5.5GB of photos and movies. I don't have a single photograph or movie of my own on this machine and it is still showing me this.

What gives?

Use this util to find out what's taking your space

Grand Perspective

 

[Pipper99]

Just a thought, but my ssd on my windows laptop filled up like this, and I finally determined it was due to all of my iPhone and iPad backups into iTunes. Check to see how many backups you have in iTunes preferences. I free'd up a ton of space by deleting most of them.

 

[petrucci666]

Just a thought, but my ssd on my windows laptop filled up like this, and I finally determined it was due to all of my iPhone and iPad backups into iTunes. Check to see how many backups you have in iTunes preferences. I free'd up a ton of space by deleting most of them.

Great advice! It free'd up about 20 GB! But that was taken away from the 'Other' category. I'm still showing the 15GB of music, 5.5GB of movies and 2.5GB of photos...

Here's the situation now (see attachement)

 

[Minhthien]

Great advice! It free'd up about 20 GB! But that was taken away from the 'Other' category. I'm still showing the 15GB of music, 5.5GB of movies and 2.5GB of photos...

Here's the situation now (see attachement)

Can you try Disk Utility and delete free space?

 

[xkmxkmxlmx]

What is the "other" used for? You don't seem to be asking about that.

I just checked my iMac stats. And weirdly, it shows about 13GB more in "music" than iTunes shows. 93GB, and iTunes says 80GB. Weird.

 

[petrucci666]

What is the "other" used for? You don't seem to be asking about that.

I just checked my iMac stats. And weirdly, it shows about 13GB more in "music" than iTunes shows. 93GB, and iTunes says 80GB. Weird.

I thought 'Other' would be like documents, systems settings and whatnot. It does seem a bit too high just to be settings etc.

But I'm really curious about all the music, movies and photos. It doesn't make any sense - I have nothing!

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Can you try Disk Utility and delete free space?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, please explain.

 

[TC25]

Can you try Disk Utility and delete free space?

Huh? How do you delete free space?

 

[Raptura]

I don't know how to help you, but I'm curious how you get that iTunes like info bar pane for the harddrive. It's similar to the iPod/iPhone/iPad info bar in iTunes.

 

[petrucci666]

I don't know how to help you, but I'm curious how you get that iTunes like info bar pane for the harddrive. It's similar to the iPod/iPhone/iPad info bar in iTunes.

You go to 'About This Mac', then 'More Info' after which you get the nice visual representation of your laptop and some basic info about the system, finally in that window you'll see 4 tabs, one of which is 'Storage' - voila!

 

[Pipper99]

I thought 'Other' would be like documents, systems settings and whatnot. It does seem a bit too high just to be settings etc.

But I'm really curious about all the music, movies and photos. It doesn't make any sense - I have nothing!

----------

The "Other" category appears way too high for just documents, settings, etc. Perhaps you could search based on file size, for example, search for files/etc that are over 500MB or over 1GB.

 

[schizbomb]

Ok, so I went from a 500GB 13" MBP to a 128GB MBA. No biggie since I'm using Rdio and Google Music for my cloud music entertainment, my movies and photos are on an external hard drive and that's pretty much it for the media.

But again, the storage is showing 15GB of music even though iTunes is empty, as well as 2.5 and 5.5GB of photos and movies. I don't have a single photograph or movie of my own on this machine and it is still showing me this.

What gives?

Where do you go to see that graphic?

 

[theSeb]

Go into Finder, and then your home directory. Now "right click" or "double tap" or Ctrl + Click and select "Show View Options". Now tick "Calculate All Sizes" and close the window by pressing x at the top left corner. Make sure that size is one of the visible columns. Now give your computer a little bit of time. You will now see exactly how much space each of the directories is taking up.

Or open your Terminal from Applications-->Utilities

type in

cd ~ [hit enter]
du -d1 -h [enter]

You'll get something like this

1.0M ./.dropbox
4.0K ./.dvdcss
19G ./.Trash
200M ./Code
3.9G ./Desktop
30M ./Documents
3.7G ./Downloads
7.9M ./Dropbox
7.0G ./Library
16G ./Movies
10G ./Music
6.0M ./Pictures
0B ./Public
76K ./Temp

Now you can see where your space is in your home directory. Don't forget that your applications, your system folders, your hidden recovery partition and your Library all take up quite a lot of space as well.

----------

Where do you go to see that graphic?

He's already explained it in a later post that is 2 posts above yours.

 

[applefanDrew]

Great advice! It free'd up about 20 GB! But that was taken away from the 'Other' category. I'm still showing the 15GB of music, 5.5GB of movies and 2.5GB of photos...

Here's the situation now (see attachement)

Just b/c it doesn't show up in iTunes doesn't mean the music files arent on e computer. You need to delete the actual files, not just iTunes references to then.

 

[qwerf123]

I had the same issue with 120gb 'other'

Sadly,the only way I could fix it was backing up my files and restoring lion!

 

[Raptura]

You go to 'About This Mac', then 'More Info' after which you get the nice visual representation of your laptop and some basic info about the system, finally in that window you'll see 4 tabs, one of which is 'Storage' - voila!

Thank you! I'm clearly too dumb to have known that lol

 

[yukon8170]

Do you have File Vault enabled? It uses a ton of storage space on the SSD for the encrypted files. I know that is the issue with my MBA, most of the drive is being used for these 8MB files.

If anyone knows of any easy way to fix this, let me know!

thnx

 

[xkmxkmxlmx]

Just b/c it doesn't show up in iTunes doesn't mean the music files arent on e computer. You need to delete the actual files, not just iTunes references to then.

Yes, I thought maybe this was what OP was doing as well. Until I checked my music settings and I am showing similar behavior. All my music is located in the iTunes folders. There is no music files anywhere else on my computer and I am showing a 13gb difference in what the actual music folders get info says, what itunes says and what the HDD breakdown says.

 

[petrucci666]

Just b/c it doesn't show up in iTunes doesn't mean the music files arent on e computer. You need to delete the actual files, not just iTunes references to then.

Like I said, it's a brand new laptop. I didn't copy any music to it nor did I backup my iTunes on the previous Mac. I use Google Music and Rdio for music so there physically is no music on the laptop anywhere, let alone 15GB of it.

 

[petrucci666]

Go into Finder, and then your home directory. Now "right click" or "double tap" or Ctrl + Click and select "Show View Options". Now tick "Calculate All Sizes" and close the window by pressing x at the top left corner. Make sure that size is one of the visible columns. Now give your computer a little bit of time. You will now see exactly how much space each of the directories is taking up.

Or open your Terminal from Applications-->Utilities

type in

cd ~ [hit enter]
du -d1 -h [enter]

You'll get something like this

1.0M ./.dropbox
4.0K ./.dvdcss
19G ./.Trash
200M ./Code
3.9G ./Desktop
30M ./Documents
3.7G ./Downloads
7.9M ./Dropbox
7.0G ./Library
16G ./Movies
10G ./Music
6.0M ./Pictures
0B ./Public
76K ./Temp

Now you can see where your space is in your home directory. Don't forget that your applications, your system folders, your hidden recovery partition and your Library all take up quite a lot of space as well.

----------



He's already explained it in a later post that is 2 posts above yours.

I tried this and got a less outrageous picture of how everything is distributed:

2.8G ./Desktop
15G ./Documents
156K ./Downloads
891M ./Dropbox
46M ./eBooks
23G ./Library
0B ./Movies
1.6G ./Music
5.7M ./Pictures
8.0K ./Public
9.4M ./Scanner Output
56K ./Sites



Still I don't get where the system is finding 1.6GB of music when I don't have anything in iTunes. But I can deal with the 1.6GB of music, it's no problem.

But why is the graphic breakdown showing something completely different than what Terminal is giving me? Is it a bug or what?

 

[jsolares]

I tried this and got a less outrageous picture of how everything is distributed:

2.8G ./Desktop
15G ./Documents
156K ./Downloads
891M ./Dropbox
46M ./eBooks
23G ./Library
0B ./Movies
1.6G ./Music
5.7M ./Pictures
8.0K ./Public
9.4M ./Scanner Output
56K ./Sites



Still I don't get where the system is finding 1.6GB of music when I don't have anything in iTunes. But I can deal with the 1.6GB of music, it's no problem.

But why is the graphic breakdown showing something completely different than what Terminal is giving me? Is it a bug or what?

That's just the files in your home dir, run the same command in /

cd /
sudo du -d1 -h

 

[hefeglass]

In Lion, Time machine backs up stuff on your HD too!

I found this out after seeing a large backup drive on my HD...apparently there is a way to prevent it from doing this, but I figured I would leave it incase I need time machine and i don't have my external TM drive hooked up

 

[KnightWRX]

That's just the files in your home dir, run the same command in /

cd /
sudo du -d1 -h

You do realise that this command is much more helpful in hunting down the big culprits :

sudo du -akx / | sort -nr | head -20

That will give you the top 20 biggest files/folders on your hard drive.

 

[bbhegedus]

For some reason there seems to be weird things taking up space on mine too. Also, since updating to 10.7.1 the preview thing where it shows how your storage is divide up doesn't even display right.... see here: http://cl.ly/9MwZ

I really hope apple fixes this pretty soon

 

[theSeb]

I tried this and got a less outrageous picture of how everything is distributed:

2.8G ./Desktop
15G ./Documents
156K ./Downloads
891M ./Dropbox
46M ./eBooks
23G ./Library
0B ./Movies
1.6G ./Music
5.7M ./Pictures
8.0K ./Public
9.4M ./Scanner Output
56K ./Sites



Still I don't get where the system is finding 1.6GB of music when I don't have anything in iTunes. But I can deal with the 1.6GB of music, it's no problem.

But why is the graphic breakdown showing something completely different than what Terminal is giving me? Is it a bug or what?

Your library folder is huge. There is no bug so I am not sure what you're asking.