Trying to find files to delete but can't

[Management]

I'm still trying to learn my way around OSX but I currently have a 120GB SSD that has reached capacity. When I open finder, click on my home folder, and then press space bar I get calculation of 93.9 GB with 8 items. If I got to each of those 8 items individually and add up the total GB it totals to ~50GB.

1. Where is the remaining 40+ GB?
2. If I go to Applications under favorities in finder it states it is 6.74 GB. Is that included in that 93.9 GB from the home folder? If so, where is the rest of these files.

I don't understand why I don't have more space. Finder states that I have 4.93 of available space. This is nuts because I am not aware of anything else that is on my SSD.

I do have an external drive with movies on it connected via firewire. PLEX accesses that drive.

Any help understanding this would be great. Thanks.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

To find out, where you storage capacity is being used, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

And what exact Mac and Mac OS X version do you have?

 

[charlieegan3]

something like this: http://whatsizemac.com might help. or ccleaner

 

[Gregg2]

Is there a bunch of stuff sitting in your Trash?

 

[Management]

something like this: http://whatsizemac.com might help. or ccleaner

Tried ccleaner and that only cleaned 500MB. :-(

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Is there a bunch of stuff sitting in your Trash?

I emptied the trash even before ccleaner. Thanks for the suggestion.

Are there hidden files somewhere? That would be a lot of hidden files.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Tried ccleaner and that only cleaned 500MB. :-(

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I emptied the trash even before ccleaner. Thanks for the suggestion.

Are there hidden files somewhere? That would be a lot of hidden files.

Have you taken a look at post #2 and used one or two of the linked applications?

Btw, those temporary files will get recreated upon need, thus deleting caches is sometimes counterproductive.
Five Mac maintenance myths

 

[MaltegoMisfit]

old school

Open the Finder, go to Applications, then Utilities. Start Terminal.

type pwd - this will show you the directory you are starting in - probably /Users/your_name

Which directory did you want to examine? You could cd /<enter> to get to the top of your whole file system.

Once there the following incantation is very useful:

du -a | grep "^[0-9]"

This is disk usage (du), all files (-a) then pipe the output to grep, which is looking for the beginning of a line (^) followed by any single digit between 0-9. You will want to append a few extra [0-9] to the first one, and I would guess you will want to have 5 - 7 of them, so you only see very large files.


Hope that's not too scary for those used to graphical interfaces - it's how an old Unix guy would solve that problem.

 

[Management]

To find out, where you storage capacity is being used, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

And what exact Mac and Mac OS X version do you have?

OmniDiskSweeper is awesome. Thank you!

My follow-up question, how do I know if the application support items are not critical items that shouldn't be deleted? And what is iLifeAssetManagement?

 

[RabidMacFan]

Focus on your Downloads, Music, Movies, and Pictures folder. Don't delete any other files if you don't know what they are there for. If you do decide to delete items in the Application Support folder, only trash items for applications that you no longer have installed. If you use iPhoto, iMovie, or GarageBand, then don't delete iLifeAssetManagement.