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So something's swallowing about 800gb of disk space on my mac.

I've ran Disk Inventory X and Omni Sweeper, and both show that my main OS drive only houses 30 GB worth of data. 10GB of that is Home folders from the network share, and the rest I'm guessing is OS based guff.

But where the hell is the other 200 or so?!

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Mr Rabbit
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    Can you post a screenshot of Disk Inventory X's results, including the synopsis along it's right side? – Mr Rabbit Aug 07 '14 at 15:48
  • See http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/124127/others-in-macintosh-hd/124143#124143 or the other linked questions for how to get general information on what takes up space. – bmike Aug 08 '14 at 14:03

3 Answers3

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The biggest issue here is that you need to run your analysis tools as root. If you don't do this, you'll only see the files that your account has access to, and so you won't see everything that is taking up space.

I like GrandPerspective personally. If it's in your Applications folder, the command to run it as root looks like this:

sudo /Applications/GrandPerspective.app/Contents/MacOS/GrandPerspective
D Schlachter
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1

I'd suggest an application called DaisyDisk, it lets you drill down to each folder level to determine which directory is taking up all of the space. A lot of times, it's either ./MobileBackups or /private/var/vm. The former is where Time Machine stores local, offline cached backups, and /private/var/vm is where sleepimage files are kept. Those typically size up to 1.5x the amount of installed system RAM. The purpose of sleepimage files is to store all of your open data to disk when you put your computer to sleep.

There are a variety of methods to disable both.

Disable /.MobileBackups:

sudo tmutil disablelocal Disable /.MobileBackups  
touch /.MobileBackups   
sudo chflags uchg /.MobileBackups

Disable sleepimage files: 

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0  
rm -rf /private/var/vm/*  
sudo chflags uchg /private/var/vm

Link to DaisyDisk (be sure to run your scan as an administrator)

nohillside
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Patrick McMahon
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0

That is hard to answer without taking the time to do more analysis.

Some things to try:

1) Reboot the computer and see if some of the used space is cleared up. This may occur if the /tmp folder is large.

2) From an administrator account, open Terminal.app and use the du command (display disk usage information). I find du gives me more control than graphical disk analyzing tools, which are often limited by the authorities granted to the user running the application. I start by issuing:

sudo du -sh /Users

This will summarize the space used for user files.

Then move to different directories on the drive.

Check out the man du page for more options.

tim.rohrer
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