Something is eating up hard drive

[LtCore]

I have a 15" Retina MacBook Pro running 10.10.5. For the past couple days something is slowly taking up space on my hard drive, almost like logs are piling up.

I'm not a system admin so my troubleshooting skills are a bit limited. There is no adware running on my Mac and I've deleted apps I'm not using. I have a ton of DNS errors showing up in the console. Looks like my Mac is trying to connect to a directory/shared volume at work even when I'm away from the work network.

Activity Monitor looks pretty normal too. Are there any other tricks and tips I can try to figure this out. I have 19gb left on my hard drive before it won't boot, so pretty min the next day and a half. Thanks!

Jeff

 

[LtCore]

Sorry for the bump, does anyone have any ideas on what this could be? Hard drive is almost consumed Thx!

 

[Goatllama]

I found this:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4847571

And this:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-hard-drive-keeps-filling-up.864202

Either of those point you in the right direction? Do you have Steam installed and it's freaking out and collecting too many logs? I couldn't find much else.

 

[LtCore]

Thx for the reply. I'm not using Steam. Also checked the Private/Vars/Logs folder and nothing big in there. Only 12gb left now, 6gb consumed in 30 minutes!!!!

Grand Perspective showed a 16gb photo library but I only sync to my other Mac. I have Photos turned off in iCloud but pics are still being imported to my library, not Photo Stream. Thoroughly confused on both accounts.

 

[AZhappyjack]

I use OmniDiskSweeper to search for problem areas on my rMBP. So far, I've found it quite helpful.

 

[Goatllama]

What shows in about this Mac for the storage? Does one section seem to be larger than others? If you go to Library > Logs, do any of those folders show larger amounts than others?

 

[LtCore]

What shows in about this Mac for the storage? Does one section seem to be larger than others? If you go to Library > Logs, do any of those folders show larger amounts than others?

86gb App's
72gb Photos
65gb Other

Biggest categories by far. Still don't understand why my photos are syncing to my work laptop.

I'm running OmniSweeper now.

 

[LtCore]

There's an iPhoto library with 17gb and a Photos library with 19gb. When I migrated from iPhoto to Photos it must have kept the iPhoto library.

 

[Goatllama]

There's an iPhoto library with 17gb and a Photos library with 19gb. When I migrated from iPhoto to Photos it must have kept the iPhoto library.

What about the Log folder in your library? Did you look at that yet?

 

[chscag]

OP:

Are you running Time Machine? If you are and away from your external hard drive, Time Machine will continue to make backups but will instead store them on your hard drive until you again attach the Time Machine external drive. That can fill up a hard drive fairly quickly especially if you're using a smallish SSD.

 

[Goatllama]

OP:

Are you running Time Machine? If you are and away from your external hard drive, Time Machine will continue to make backups but will instead store them on your hard drive until you again attach the Time Machine external drive. That can fill up a hard drive fairly quickly especially if you're using a smallish SSD.

Wait, seriously? Does it clear those out the next time you make a backup to the external drive?

 

[LtCore]

Time Machine has been off on this laptop.

~Library/Logs has 37mb.

 

[LtCore]

5.1gb in Library/Containers. What is that used for?

 

[Goatllama]

5.1gb in Library/Containers. What is that used for?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/library-containers-safe-to-delete.1549923 (and from that thread, https://developer.apple.com/library...atingALegacyApp/MigratingAnAppToASandbox.html ) says that as long as the files within there correspond to old applications they're safe to delete. Really just depends.

 

[LtCore]

Guess what? Looks like it has stopped for now. A message came up asking me to update Adobe Acrobat. After I updated whatever was chewing up my hard drive stopped. What the heck! The used hard disk space is still missing though. Can't find any log that is associated with Adobe that is a big size. Ideas?

 

[AZhappyjack]

Wait, seriously? Does it clear those out the next time you make a backup to the external drive?

You can also turn off the local back ups with this Terminal command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

 

[Goatllama]

Guess what? Looks like it has stopped for now. A message came up asking me to update Adobe Acrobat. After I updated whatever was chewing up my hard drive stopped. What the heck! The used hard disk space is still missing though. Can't find any log that is associated with Adobe that is a big size. Ideas?

I agree, Adobe is to blame, those charlatans! Uninstall and reinstall Acrobat.

You can also turn off the local back ups with this Terminal command:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

So it does remove them once you backup to your normal backup drive?

 

[Weaselboy]

So it does remove them once you backup to your normal backup drive?

No it doesn't. It will keep the local snapshots until the drive approaches 80% full, then the OS will begin to delete them. You can read about it here.
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There's an iPhoto library with 17gb and a Photos library with 19gb. When I migrated from iPhoto to Photos it must have kept the iPhoto library.

It does, but that iPhoto library is not using 17GB of space like you might think. Give this a read.

 

[LtCore]

Quick update: I thought I fixed it but it's still happening. I freed up 25gb but that's almost gone, down to 4gb. At my wit's end here