"Other" Taking up 300GB of space HELP!

[Enoch07]

I have a macbook pro mid-2010 with 500 GB of hard drive space. Nearly 300 is being taken up by "Other". I have no Idea how to fix this. I tried omnidisk sweeper and daisy disk. neither of which helped. I tried repairing disk permissions and that didn't help either. It seems that no matter what disk sweeper I use it can't find the hidden space. How can I fix this?

 

[Hellhammer]

Try Disk Inventory X to see what's taking up space.

 

[Enoch07]

Try Disk Inventory X to see what's taking up space.

I just tried it. It didn't help. It only brought up 100GB of normal files. There's 300GB of other files that I can't find.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

Try this instead of Disk Inventory:
DiskWave:
https://diskwave.barthe.ph

It will present you with a decidedly NON-graphical display of your files and folders, with names, etc. I find this FAR easier to use than the various "graphical display" disk usage utilities out there.

Just download it (free) and launch it.
You'll see what to do next.
TIP: From preferences, choose to make normally-invisible files VISIBLE.

 

[Weaselboy]

I just tried it. It didn't help. It only brought up 100GB of normal files. There's 300GB of other files that I can't find.

Run the command below from Terminal and give it a minute to complete, then post the output here. It will show all the base folders along with space used in GB for each folder. The GUI utilities mentioned earlier will not show some system and hidden folders since the apps do not have root access like this command does.

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

 

[hobowankenobi]

I like Omni DiskSweeper.......but:

For some files to show up, it must be run as root. Anything that is in a directory that an admin user does not have access too, will NOT show up when run from the admin account.

Just did this for a user about a week ago. Enable root and run DiskSweeper (or the tool of your choice) again, and I expect you will see the culprit.

The machine I ran it on had huge temp files left over from FC Pro. Found and deleted them, mystery solved.

 

[Weaselboy]

I like Omni DiskSweeper.......but:

For some files to show up, it must be run as root. Anything that is in a directory that an admin user does not have access too, will NOT show up when run from the admin account.

Just did this for a user about a week ago. Enable root and run DiskSweeper (or the tool of your choice) again, and I expect you will see the culprit.

The machine I ran it on had huge temp files left over from FC Pro. Found and deleted them, mystery solved.

This is correct, but you can run ODS as sudo and accomplish the same thing without enabling root. Just run the below command in Terminal to launch an ODS instance as root.

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

 

[hobowankenobi]

This is correct, but you can run ODS as sudo and accomplish the same thing without enabling root. Just run the below command in Terminal to launch an ODS instance as root.

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Good to know. Faster and safer than enabling root, logging in, etc.

Great tip.

 

[BrianBaughn]

If Time Machine is "on", your TM disk hasn't been accessible and if you've been making a LOT of changes to files (modifying large files, adding and deleting a LOT of BIG files) I could imagine Time Machine snapshots using that much space. The way it seems to me, there could be as many as seven daily snapshots plus one for every week back since the last time TM ran. I'd bet against it, though.

 

[AppleNewton]

Turn off time machine and wait a few minutes and check again. If that's the case try a new backup and it should clear up if so.