Hard Drive Space Eaten Up Daily. Think Crashplan may be a reason. Need Help

disk-spacehard drive

I've been suffering with this for weeks. I'm running Yosemite on a 15" MBP. I am told daily that I have no more disk space and no matter what I end up deleting I'm left with 1GB minutes later.

About This Mac Storage (and Daisy Disk) say I have 247GB in Other.

Disk Inventory doesn't recognize that and just says I'm using 37GB of my SSD.

I can't remember the terminal command I used from another thread but it showed mobile backups and another folder taking up well over 100GB of my space but no one told me how to either clear those to free the space or how to prevent it from reoccurring.

Important to note I used crashplan for awhile and removed it about 3 months ago.

I desperately need my hard drive back!

Best Answer

For others with similar problems, you don't need a special utility to find out where all your GB have gone on a Mac.

First, turn on invisible files. On newer Macs, you can do that with Command Shift Period. On older Macs, you do need a quick defaults terminal command.

Once you've done that, open your hard drive, and put it in to List View

Then go to the View menu and choose Show View Options Check Calculate all Sizes

Now wait. It can take a while because there are lots of sizes to add up, but eventually it will show you the sizes of every folder. You can use the disclosure triangles to open more and more folders and drill down to where all of your data is being used. I also usually sorts by the Size column so the big stuff is right at the top.

As a professional Mac consultant, this is the method I use to find people's data, I don't bother with any 3rd party utilities for this.

Related Solutions

OS X Private Folder – Runaway file “crash recovery” 126.61GB!

Yes. You have enabled auditing somewhere along the line, being a wise person, but you have not trimmed the file, being a human, like I. Note the instant edit ;)

man -k audit

if you can get a shell will show you where you need to go

( look at them on the apple dev site )

i think here you want

audit -e

to get rid of your old audit files.

From the man page:

The audit utility controls the state of the audit system. One of the following flags is required as an argument to audit:

 -e      Forces the audit system to immediately remove audit log files
         that meet the expiration criteria specified in the audit control
         file without doing a log rotation.

 -i      Initializes and starts auditing.  This option is currently for
         Mac OS X only and requires auditd(8) to be configured to run
         under launchd(8).

 -n      Forces the audit system to close the existing audit log file and
         rotate to a new log file in a location specified in the audit
         control file.  Also, audit log files that meet the expiration
         criteria specified in the audit control file will be removed.

 -s      Specifies that the audit system should [re]synchronize its con-
         figuration from the audit control file.  A new log file will be
         created.

 -t      Specifies that the audit system should terminate.  Log files are
         closed and renamed to indicate the time of the shutdown.

On my system:

ls /var/audit
20110414160828.20110415024057 20110420155533.20110421134946
20110415024148.20110416200834 20110421140348.20110421151928
20110416200951.20110417013744 20110421152018.20110422125418
20110417014358.crash_recovery 20110422125606.20110422205003
20110417024720.20110417120347 20110422205003.20110423102007
20110417135346.20110419142539 20110423102114.20110423204207
20110419144659.20110419150605 20110423204320.20110424094847
20110419150626.20110419201121 20110424094940.not_terminated
20110419201223.20110419225009 build
20110419225100.20110420153215 current
[root:8va:0:~ ]# du -h /var/audit
4.0K    /var/audit/build
6.0M    /var/audit

Yes. It's audit -e

[root:8va:0:~ ]# audit -e
Trigger sent.
[root:8va:0:~ ]# du -h /var/audit
4.0K    /var/audit/build
6.0M    /var/audit

MacBook – Running out of hard drive space, yet Disk Inventory shows only 190GB used vs. 480 GB used in HD Get Info? How is that possible

Time Machine local backups

If you use Time Machine, my guess is that the discrepancy is from local backups. If so, you can free up that space by connecting your Time Machine drive and running letting Time Machine complete a backup.

Once you have done that, you might want to disable local backups by issuing this command in Terminal.app:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

but keep in mind that the local backups are meant to provide a safety net for those times when your Time Machine drive is not attached.

If the cause is not Time Machine, try OmniDiskSweeper

If that is not it, I recommend using OmniDiskSweeper to check your drive space.

ODS is a free app, and works very simply. When you launch ODS, it will show you a "Drive List" showing all of the available drives. Choose your main hard drive and then it will start searching.

The results are shown in a very simple column format, similar to the Finder. The largest folders will bubble to the top, and will let you see exactly where your disk space has gone.

Using OmniDiskSweeper as root

ODS will only calculate the sizes of the folders that you can read. 99% of the time, that should show you the problem.

However, if you want to be sure that you are seeing everything you can launch the app as root using this command:

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

BUT BE VERY VERY CAREFUL WHEN DOING THIS, since ODS will allow you to delete files.