Drastically dropping free space on new 2015 15" MBP

[lhodaniel]

Hi guys,

I need some intel from experienced Mac users. (As you might remember I switched from all Windows to a rMBP last December.) My 512mb SSD is filling up like crazy! I've already talked to Apple support awhile back, when free space suddenly dropped from 300mb to 225. Now the thing has dropped to about 170mb. I have quite a few apps on here, as I'm using this as both desktop and laptop. But nowhere near the amount of space reporting as used. The vast majority of this used space (300mb) shows at "other" in the finder. I've been very diligent running Clean My Mac, etc. and keeping trash cans clean. The Apple support person I got before pretty much blew it off as not being able to determine because they couldn't see my particular system. I might make an appoinment at the local Apple Store with a Genius to go over this machine specifically.

I've read that a possible culprit is the Time Machine local snapshots. I have TM backing up everything right now, and I also have Carbon Copy Cloner doing the system. The backups and my local data storage are on externals. I make sure that my downloaded files are transferred to an external. IOW, I keep as little as possible in /Users etc.

As I understand it, the snapshots will be created until the SSD is 80% full before any pruning takes place (!). More aggressive pruning occurs at the 90% mark. How the hell am I going to have any space left for files (images) to be stored when on the road? Is there not a way to limit the space used for that purpose like with System Restore in Windows?

System drive usage on a Mac seems very different and less efficient than on Windows. I know there is a way to turn off snapshots completely but I like the idea of than if I'm caught out without my externals. And I know I could not use TM at all (which might have to happen), but I like it otherwise.

Some education on all of this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Lloyd

[degrub]

Grab an external ssd for on the road backups and don't use the local disk for time machine / ccc

[BobShaw]

I don't think it is TimeMachine. If it does make a local copy then it gets deleted if space is filled and doesn't show up in space calculations. Leave the machine running overnight as it does disk maintenance when idle for a long time.

[AlterEgo]

I need some intel from experienced Mac users.

from a windows user

sudo du -sx -m /* 2>/dev/null | sort -n

then dig into suspected location, repeat (replace /* with ./* actually when digging in), etc

[lhodaniel]

Thanks! I'll give that a try when I have time. Looks like I need to learn UNIX. I'll also let the machine run overnight and see if that helps.

Lloyd

[francois]

If you think it's the local Time Machine backups then try to disable it.

Here's a simple to follow step-by-step way:

http://jonathanadaley.com/post/81410190765/delete-local-snapshots-backups-osx

Let us know whether you reclaimed lost space or not.

[rdonson]

Have you considered that you have some large cache files on the machine???

[lhodaniel]

Francois, I pdf'd you message to give that a try. I have an appointment at the local Aplle Store with a Genius this afternoon. So, I'm going to leave everything as-is until then. I lost another 5G today, and did nothing to cause that.

rdonson, I did check caches. Their sizes don't add up to this magnitude of storage. I did find that C1P was backing up to /users. I guess I forgot to change that. I fixed it and moved the backups to an external, but this was only about 5G.

I'll post what the Genius says after looking at this specific machine.

Thank you all!

Lloyd

[lhodaniel]

Well, the culprit was Time Machine. Mobilebackups.trash was not being automatically emptied as is should and was 273GB. The Genius had never seen this before, but I think I read something on the web about it. His method of manually deleting with a root user account left some undeletable stuff in my Trash. I was also on the phone with Apple Support for a couple of hours with a tech supervisor who tried everything to get rid of this stuff. Errors were files either in use or permissions. We finally decided to do a system restore with TM to before the Genius appt. then disable and renable snapshots via the terminal.

Everything is back and apps seem to be there and are working. The only mildly troubling thing is now the system is reporting too much free space...446GB. I was expecting about 335GB. I'm hoping this is just because of reindexing or other innocuous reasons.

So, hopefully, problem solved.

Lloyd

[rdonson]

Thanks for the update, Lloyd.  That's pretty unsettling that Time Machine behaved that way.  For me, TM has not performed satisfactorily over the last 4 years and I stopped using it.  I simply rely on my Carbon Copy Cloner backups now.  There are several Mac backup options that do a good job and each have their adherents.

[Chris Livsey]

Well, the culprit was Time Machine. Mobilebackups.trash was not being automatically emptied as is should and was 273GB
So, hopefully, problem solved.

Lloyd

Many thanks for the update,it was a cliff hanger ending, hope it behaves.
As virtually all the Apple range is "do not buy update due" I am waiting since my MBP died and have wavered by looking at the dark side, good to know they delivered a solution.

[BobShaw]

I have never had a problem with TimeMachine in probably 10 years of using it, but I have had a problem with Trash.
So was this file in the Trash? If so was the trash icon showing full?
I have had stuff in the Trash that I could not remove and had to use a utility called "Trash It!" to get it to empty. Permissions problem of some sort that could not be fixed.

I suggest you just turn off TimeMachine except when you want to attach a portable drive to use.
Anyway good to see that Apple support came through. My 2010 MBP is still going strong.

[rdonson]

My biggest problem with Time Machine was that it was dumb.  In the middle of a PS and Lr session it would start up and my machine would come to a crawl until I stopped it or went for a coffee.  Perhaps Apple gave it some gray matter since I used it last but that seems unlikely.

[BobShaw]

It should have scheduling built in but usually for a workstation you just turn it off until you want to backup. There are a mountain of utilities that you can use to set backup schedules. My server backups up at 1AM each night and I find that is plenty.

[Joe Towner]

Take a look at http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

It'll show what's taking up how much space

[lhodaniel]

I have never had a problem with TimeMachine in probably 10 years of using it, but I have had a problem with Trash.
So was this file in the Trash? If so was the trash icon showing full?
I have had stuff in the Trash that I could not remove and had to use a utility called "Trash It!" to get it to empty. Permissions problem of some sort that could not be fixed.

The original problem was that the .mobilebackups.trash (old local snapshots) folder was not being purged by TM automatically as it should. I had two months of snapshots totalling 273GB! The trash not deleting issue was caused by the Genius' method for fixing that, which I found out from the Cupertino tech supervisor later was not the way to do it. The Genius admitted that he had never seen the issue before. He manually moved the contents of the hidden folder to a folder he named Trashme and moved that to trash. But, after that, OS X would not allow those files to be emptied, even from the root user account. Apple's solution is to just disable and enable local snapshots using sudo commands, with restarts after each. In my case, we had to do a TM full system restore to get back to status quo. That actually emptied the stuff from mb.trash because TM doesn't back that folder up anyway.

This morning, for the first time, the computer refused to wake from sleep. I had to do a force restart. I'm afraid this is collateral damage from using the TM-restored system. I hope I don't have to do a clean OS X install. This is the sort of thing I was hoping to avoid by switching to Mac.

Lloyd

[rdonson]

It should have scheduling built in but usually for a workstation you just turn it off until you want to backup. There are a mountain of utilities that you can use to set backup schedules. My server backups up at 1AM each night and I find that is plenty.

Yes, there are lots of scheduling apps even in the Mac App Store that provide some intelligence for Time Machine.  The thing is that if I'm scheduling TM for in the middle of the night I'll simply use that feature in Carbon Copy Cloner and save the hassle of Time Machine.