MacOS – filling up the hard drive so fast

disk-spacehard drivemacos

Last night (Because my hard drive was almost full) I freed about 4GB. Then I came back to my Macbook about 3hrs later (I left it idle) and Its was full again.

Is something is eating my mac?

If I go to /About This Mac/Info/Storage then it says I have 90GB of "Other"

This worries me and I thought it was just me imagining things, but I think there IS something wrong with my mac as I believe that it was also happening when i had Mountain-Lion before Mavericks.

Edit: Activity Monitor

launchD 1.28GB Written

Kernel_task 764MB Written

mds 475MB Read

Now this a list of the user column (note I am the only user on this Mac):

  • root
  • _mdnsresponder
  • _spotlight
  • _softwareupdate
  • _locationd
  • _networkd myname

Best Answer

You don't need special software (although there are nice options like What Size and the also-popular Daisy Disk) or to run commands in terminal to track 4 GB of change.

Apple's System Information app draws the About This Mac information that you get from Apple Menu -> About This Mac -> Storage Tab (at the top).

Storage

Click Manage for more details.

Recommendations view

Click Review Files if the higher priority recommendations don't work or are not palatable to your use case.

sorted list of large documents that aren't used often or may be deleted

Then you can know what files and buckets are the largest users of space and/or notice which buckets grow over time.

Additionally, Time Machine is very nice for telling you what files have changed if you use that tool for your backups. It would know exactly what time interval new files grew and changed since you can use a tool like BackupLoupe (or tmutil compare if you do like command line tools) to visually inspect the difference between two backup intervals to see what files used more space on your Mac.

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A very low level tool to see actual writes is fs_usage but it's a bit technical and you'll need to know|learn grep or awk to reduce the output of this tool

sudo fs_usage -w

To quit the activity dump, press control C

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