MBP 2011 HD space disappearing

[Hughm]

I noticed that the free space on my HD is being slowly reduced - on the order of 0.01G every few hours. I have Safari open most of the day, run Adobe CC Desktop all the time, and otherwise just do my work. Nothing exotic. Wonder if there is a way to find out what is filling up this space and how I might correct this problem. I am not a very sophisticated computer user.

Thanks

 

[iMacDragon]

check memory tab in activity monitor, is swap file usage slowly increasing over time?

 

[Hughm]

check memory tab in activity monitor, is swap file usage slowly increasing over time?

Does not appear so. This all started after I bought an Adobe CC subscription and began running the CC Desktop utility full time. I'll shut that down for a day or two and see what happens.

 

[Mascots]

There could be a large degree of things going on, but in the very essence of computer engineering, you can expect a computer to consume space as it runs without your explicit interaction relating to that. Instances such as Safari caches, Adobe caching things, temporary files, Local Time Machine backups, memory paging, HFS rearrangement of files on disk, and endless more can cause minor shifts in the used space on a hard drive.

There are other situations that are worrisome, like a hard drive failure, though they often come with other side effects. Does this number continuously rise to where it's a common trend? When you restart does the number seem to be increasing?

Also in the Activity Monitor, under the Disk tab, you can see what processes are reading/writing the disk which may help you pinpoint some sort of rogue execution.

 

[Hughm]

There could be a large degree of things going on, but in the very essence of computer engineering, you can expect a computer to consume space as it runs without your explicit interaction relating to that. Instances such as Safari caches, Adobe caching things, temporary files, Local Time Machine backups, memory paging, HFS rearrangement of files on disk, and endless more can cause minor shifts in the used space on a hard drive.

There are other situations that are worrisome, like a hard drive failure, though they often come with other side effects. Does this number continuously rise to where it's a common trend? When you restart does the number seem to be increasing?

Also in the Activity Monitor, under the Disk tab, you can see what processes are reading/writing the disk which may help you pinpoint some sort of rogue execution.

Looking at it, the only new thing writing to the disk is the Adobe Creative Cloud agent. Given that this whole thing cropped up after I obtained my CC subscription, and that the diminishment of my HD free space is very gradual, I'm going to watch carefully over the weekend to see if the new "writes" equal the HD losses.

 

[Atreyu25]

Clear your machine's cache.