MacBook keeps running out of disk space

[MatthewAbate]

Hi. I have had this Macbook for about 3 years, and now it is running out of Disk Space, but i barely have anything on the computer. Now when i restart the computer it waits about an hour before annoying me with it's low disk space and it makes me force quit everything i have open. So then i was so annoyed by it, i finally deleted stuff, so i deleted about 5 apps i did not use, then went to Imovie and deleted about 10 videos, then emptied the trash but then 5 minutes later it said it was still low on disk space. I have not downloaded anything within the past month, so i have no idea how this could be happening. What could possibly fix this problem?😕

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space​

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
  
  
• For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may be consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.
  
  OS X: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs​
  
  
• Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
  
  
• Check the System Memory tab in Activity Monitor to check page outs and swap used. If swap used is significant, restart your computer and track that value under your normal workload. If you have significant page outs under normal use, you could benefit from more RAM.
  
  
• Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
  
  
• Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
  
  
• Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
  
  
• Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

• Encrypted drive
• Time Machine backup files and needed disk repair
• App filling log file
• App or file was 89GB
• Drive needed to be re-indexed
• Time Machine backup file
• Large app cache file
• Garageband files and video podcasts
• Oversized email being duplicated
• Another email issue

Freeing up space in Mac OS X

How OS X and iOS report storage capacity

 

[TheTbuilder]

Use Omni Disk Sweeper

If you would like to free up space on your MacBook Air, download OmniDiskSweeper. Afterwards double click Macintosh HD then scroll down until you find a file called .cleverfiles. Clicking on that should take you to a couple of files, one being hlink.db. This files basically holds all the files that you ever had in your trash whether you emptied it or not. If you double click on that file it should open it in finder. Simply move the file into the trash and emty it. The file should regen itself. If so then move it to the trash again. The file will keep regenerating itself but eventually your mac's storage should grow by a lot. Don't worry about getting rid of the file just make sure that your storage is bigger and if not keep destroying the hlink.db file. Hopefully this helped 🙂