MacOS – User directory taking up an additional 100GB+ of space

disk-spacedisk-utilitymacospartition

This is on my 2013 15" Retina MBP with the 256 SSD.

Before you ask, yes, I'm including the ~/Library folder.

Home Directory Info Panel

My home directory is using ~175GB of space, which is pretty significant. I'm in a spring cleaning mood – however, I cannot seem to get even close to this value when hunting down the largest offenders.

Craigs-MBP:~ Craig$ du -shc *
 27M    Applications
 88K    Desktop
4.2G    Documents
8.0K    Downloads
198M    Google Drive
 25G    Library
8.0K    Movies
4.3G    Music
 11G    Pictures
8.0K    Public
408M    apps
3.2G    projects
 49G    total    <-- Note the convenient total

Just to be safe, I also check the .* files:

Craigs-MBP:~ Craig$ du -shc .??* | grep total
3.8G    total

So, roughly ~55GB.

I have booted into the recovery partition, and used Disk Utility to run First Aid on both the volume and partition, but it didn't pick up any invalid volume count/block sizes. Everything looked good.

I booted up Disk Inventory X hoping that it might find something I didn't, but it turns up the same values:

Disk Inventory X Results

If I'm missing 5-10GB here or there, no big deal. But nearly 120GB of missing space? That's completely unreasonable. (And half my hard drive.)

Where do I go next?

Best Answer

Take a look at Time Machine, it may be keeping local snapshots.

From Apple Support:

Because Time Machine removes local snapshots as needed, Finder and Get Info windows don't include them in their calculations. To see how much storage space local snapshots are using, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu, then click Storage. The space used by local snapshots is labeled Backups.

You can disable them, but they get automatically deleted if you need space:

  • If less than 20% of the total storage space on your startup drive is available, Time Machine removes local snapshots, starting with the oldest, until you have more than 20% free space.
  • If less than 10% or less than 5GB of storage space is available, Time Machine removes local snapshots more quickly. When only one snapshot remains, Time Machine stops creating new snapshots. As free space increases, Time Machine at first replaces the previous snapshot with a new one, then eventually resumes creating snapshots as normal.
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