MacOS – Monitor which folder has used the disk storage

macbook promacosstorage

I got a mac air with only 256 GB storage. Some apps must be using the storage and after deleting and moving everything I can (down to relocate mail and dropbox to external disk using symbolic links and their own folder), the storage is still kept on dropping. It lost quite quickly down to 0.01G per 15 minutes. Looking using du df or visual is hard to spot so far.

Is there any way (shell script etc.) to monitor which folder is increasing in size over time? (Space approach)

If that is not possible, how about a script to monitor any directories that have been modified in the last 15 minutes? (Time approach)

Many advice I found is only on one folder or one layer e.g. home/* but not the whole directory structure. Possibly to have a way to spot out an offending directory?

Best Answer

I like omni disk sweeper to see where my space is going. Link: https://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

To see which folders have changed in the last 15 minutes, run this from a command-line: $ find / -type d -cmin -15

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MacOS – Shell script: Move folders + preserve structure

Assuming that all the folders to be archived are directly in .../Completed Projects, the use of find (which traverses the whole folder hierarchy) might actually do more harm than good.

A revised version could look like

#!/bin/bash

# Go to the Completed Projects folder.
cd /Volumes/communications/Projects/Completed\ Projects/

# Find a folder with a specified string (e.g. "Academics") in its name.
# Move (not copy) the folder to its corresponding sub-folder of the Archived Projects folder. (e.g. /Academics)

for folder in *; do
    if [[ -d "$folder" ]]; then
        echo "Moving $folder";
        if [[ "$folder" == *Academics* ]]; then
            mv "$folder" /Volumes/communications/Projects/Archived\ Projects/Academics/
        fi
    fi
done

MacOS – Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix

I have the same issue since one of the mavericks updates, not necessarily the .0 version, not sure when exactly it started. I have this issue mostly with one folder: ~/Library/Preferences. I can fix the issue (see below), but 1-3 weeks later the issue is happening again with that folder. I think this folder might be hit often by the bug, cause the prefs-files in there are often changed, I dont know. Anway its a bug! If I should guess, the reason might be a bug in fsevents-daemon (fseventsd), which is responsible for tracking file system changes.

Sometimes I also have other folders than Preferences not backing up anymore, but this happens not that often.

To test which folders are "stuck" and do not backup properly you can:

do a fresh backup and keep the backup volume connected
in Terminal: tmutil compare -n

The terminal command runs 30 mins with my backup of 150 GB size. It helps identifying files which are not in the Latest backup. Be informed, some files might be shown, which are ok to be not backed up.

I also tried touch files, which did not help. What helped, was renaming the parent folder. To fix the issue for a particular folder, e. g. ~/Library/Preferences, I rename the folder twice like:

in Terminal:

sudo mv ~/Library/Preferences ~/Library/PreferenceS
sudo mv ~/Library/PreferenceS ~/Library/Preferences

Note, the last letter s/S at the end. I need sudo for the Preferences folder, cause OSX has set special access rights for that folder. So sudo might not be needed for other folders. After doing so, the files in that folder are backed up correctly again. Problem: the issue is not solved permanently. Unpredictably after 1-3 weeks the issue is back.

Best Answer

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MacOS – Shell script: Move folders + preserve structure

MacOS – Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix

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