What's Eating My HD?

[niteflyr]

Yes I'm using time machine with Time Capsule as my storage. I wouldn't think that would use any space on my HD would it?

Yes it would. Local snapshots are probably the culprit here. No big deal. They will be deleted as room is needed.

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14329

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

 

[Weaselboy]

To Weaselboy and Airthis, I hope you will forgive this newbie, but when I went into terminal to make the suggested changes, it warned me that this might cause corruption of files or loss of data. I stopped, because to be honest, I don't have any idea whether I should be worried or not. Are these sodu commands completely safe? I just don't want the medicine to be more painful than the disease.

Hans

That sudo ahead of a command just gives the command the access rights it needs to run and won't hurt anything. What I suggested is running the "du" command after sudo to get a listing of system folders along with their size. You can read about the du command here. If you read this link and compare it to the command I suggested you can verify for yourself it will do nothing more than what I said.

It will prompt you for an admin password, but you should not be seeing any message about corruption. You saw a corruption warning after entering the command below?

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

Go back to my post #17 and do everything I explained including another disk repair from the recovery partition.

I am getting a bit worried about your disk since that one Omnidisksweeper screenshot you posted does not show any large folders that would explain this, and you got all those errors in Disk Utility. Make sure you have a backup before doing anything else here.

 

[hansbraul]

Go to your home directory. There should be a file called mybigfiles.txt. Open it and see if there is anything interesting in there.

Here's what it looks like. Not sure what to make of it.

 

[hansbraul]

Yes it would. Local snapshots are probably the culprit here. No big deal. They will be deleted as room is needed.

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14329

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

BINGO!!!!!

Problem solved. Not sure why this escaped my before, but it seems I have 376 GB of local snapshots!! As long as time machine doesn't keep using this space as the disk fills up, I'll be fine.

Thank you very much for your help!

 

[Weaselboy]

Here's what it looks like. Not sure what to make of it.

View attachment 454294

Looks like you have some large files sitting in the hidden /.MobileBackups folder used by Time Machine's local backups. Open Time Machine in System Prefs and turn Time Machine off then back on then check to see how much space was reclaimed. This will delete the contents of the local backups folder.

sudo du -hs /.MobileBackups

Run this command in Terminal now and then after you cycle Time Machine off and on to see the difference in the size of that folder.

 

[hansbraul]

Looks like you have some large files sitting in the hidden /.MobileBackups folder used by Time Machine's local backups. Open Time Machine in System Prefs and turn Time Machine off then back on then check to see how much space was reclaimed. This will delete the contents of the local backups folder.

sudo du -hs /.MobileBackups

Run this command in Terminal now and then after you cycle Time Machine off and on to see the difference in the size of that folder.

Thanks a bunch for your help! See my reply abovem- I'm happy to know that all the extra storage use is just time machine doing its thing on local backups. It sure would be good if this kind of info was more obvious though!

Thanks a ton.

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks a bunch for your help! See my reply abovem- I'm happy to know that all the extra storage use is just time machine doing its thing on local backups. It sure would be good if this kind of info was more obvious though!

Thanks a ton.

Glad to help. I agree, Apple needs to somehow tell new users about this.

You might wanna do a verify disk in Disk Utility again in a couple days, just to make sure those disk errors have not reappeared. Those errors you saw have nothing to do with this local backups situation.