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DiScO197

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 27, 2008
162
1
Hi Folks,

Running a 128GB SSD and I had at least 40GB spare until I backed up my iphone 4s. I now have less than 4GB available.

Seems obvious right? My itunes and iphoto library are on an external drive and my user (home) folder is showing up as 44.8GB, but the actual folder content is more like 4GB. Any ideas where my 40GB has gone?!

Mountain Lion 10.8.2 here.

Any help much appreciated as my book is grinding to a halt!

Cheers.
 
If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML 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 be consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.

  • 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.
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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:
Freeing up space in Mac OS X

How OS X and iOS report storage capacity
 
Thanks for the detailed reply. It was indeed after switching time machine on and backing up my system for the first time in a while. I tried the command but not sure it's deleted yet, I'll check again later.

Cheers.
 
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