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What's going on with my drive?
- Thread starter Gix1k
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Space is slowly dropping and I'm not even using it...it's down even from from when I took this video and posted..
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Did you try volume verification in Disk Utility? A volume corruption once caused an issue where deleted files weren't subtracting from the free space.
Check "About this Mac" storage I suspect it`s due to local backups from TM, even if TM is set to off this can occur
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I did the verify disk and it went fine. I did verify permissions and got this...
That will just be versions of local documents etc. not what is consuming the space. Try OmniDiskSweeper it will scan the drive for space usage, however be careful what you delete, if unsure ask or don't touch...
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Thanks! I installed it and not sure what it's showing me. I did see that I have an 8gb iphone backup.
It shows you disk usage (space) as stated proceed with caution as you can delete files directly from the application, as they say "if it`s not broken, don't fix it" To be brutally honest you need to spend more time understanding OS X before you mess with the inner workings of the OS.
A good way if you have a spare hard drive is to clone your drive to a bootable external image with SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, this way whatever you do the clone your primary drive and more importantly your data is safe.
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Everyone can learn, you just need to proceed carefully and not put your personal data at risk, a bootable external clone or an old second computer are best, this way you can safely experiment. I still do the same myself if I want to work on software or review a major update to OS X, this protects my primary & secondary systems (work).
I just do what I want to do, then either delete and create a new clone or in the case of being a Mac, I will format the drive and reinstall OS X. Cloning your Mac`s drive is easy and relatively cheap.
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I just do what I want to do, then either delete and create a new clone or in the case of being a Mac, I will format the drive and reinstall OS X. Cloning your Mac`s drive is easy and relatively cheap.
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You never know when a hard drive is going to fail. This is why I keep multiple backups of my data on external and cloud drives.
Been there, done that, HD catastrophically failed on one of my Windows systems in the field, thanks to multiple redundancy I was able to switch to one of My Mac`s and continue. I still manually backup with SuperDuper, and I have a secure cloud service (point to point encryption) which ensures all working data is backed up and updated on all my systems in realtime.Q-6
I would start using Time Machine. This is one of the reasons I use Mac. I had my HD fail several times on a previous MBA (which is not saying something good about Apple hardware), but in each case I could get all back from TM. When the same thing happened to my wife's Windows computer, she lost a lot of important data. Turns out that Windows file history does NOT backup everything, only what it thinks is important.
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I use Crashplan as my cloud backup. I've got almost 3 tb's of data backed up. All sensitive files are encrypted with 256 bit dmg files with long passwords.
It could be that Icon Services Agent is building its index and data files for the icons. I've seen it do this on some systems for hours on end and eat up over 10GB of space….I have no idea why it needs that much. I was using Mavericks but switched back to Mountain Lion just to avoid the scenario. Yosemite and I believe El Capitan will both use the process. Eventually it will stop. IMHO that process is ludicrous because it's using waaaay too much disk space for icons. The more user accounts you have on the system the worse it will be because apparently it builds its "caches" to be unique for each user account. I didn't delve into it all that much.
If you think you've got disk problems I'd recommend Scannerz for testing it, but losing space isn't normally a sign of a failing drive - more like something just eating up disk space.
Although you said Time Machine wasn't in use, verify the setting because if it is on and not connected to a Time Machine disk it will proceed with building snapshots too, and they'll eat up space as well.
Good luck.
If you think you've got disk problems I'd recommend Scannerz for testing it, but losing space isn't normally a sign of a failing drive - more like something just eating up disk space.
Although you said Time Machine wasn't in use, verify the setting because if it is on and not connected to a Time Machine disk it will proceed with building snapshots too, and they'll eat up space as well.
Good luck.