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GodWhomIsMike

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 24, 2007
580
2
I have a mid-2012 Macbook Pro, which lately I have not done anything with other than surf the web. I have noticed that my storage capacity has significantly decreased. I had a 512GB SSD, and was only using less than half of it (about 200-210GB free), up until maybe a few months ago when I last checked. I recently enabled Time Machine, and soon after, I only have about 70-75GB of free space.

Any ideas? I looked at the storage, and it says about 250GB are used for 'Other'
 
If you're wondering what "Other" category in the storage tab is about, this may help explain: 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 being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled by entering the following command in Terminal: sudo tmutil disablelocal.
  • Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
  • 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.
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  • 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:
 
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