Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: Ellis Vener on July 01, 2014, 08:41:49 pm

Title: Perplexing storage space problem on a Mac boot drive
Post by: Ellis Vener on July 01, 2014, 08:41:49 pm
I am working  with a late 2009 27" 2.66Ghz iMac running OS X 10.9.3
It is fitted with 16GB RAM. the boot drive is a  240GB OWC 3G SSD. Out of the 239.2GB available I can account for everything EXCEPT for ~47GB of the ~58GB in my user folder.
 
Issue: When I go to SSD > users > user name and use the 'get info" tool it tells me that there is 58GB in that folder. I go into the user name folder and run a "Get Info" on each folder I see there. Here's where it gets curious: the sum of those folders is only 11GB. What makes up the other  ~47GB I can't see - the contents appear to be hidden.
 
Any ideas as to what might be going on? How I can find what is in those 47TB? I hate the idea that my SSD is filled up with stuff I cannot account for.
Title: Re: Perplexing storage space problem on a Mac boot drive
Post by: sbay on July 01, 2014, 11:04:07 pm
Did you check the contents of hidden directories like Library/ ? I have 13 GB in mine. To see this in Finder hold down the option key and you should see "Library" in the Go menu.

Alternatively try running "du -sh *"  in the terminal to see a summary of disk usage by directory (this should show hidden files). Or you can use a  program like GrandPerspective (http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net) which will display file disk usage graphically.
Title: Re: Perplexing storage space problem on a Mac boot drive
Post by: Ellis Vener on July 01, 2014, 11:18:20 pm
Thanks Stephen,

I'll give those  a go in the morning.
Title: Re: Perplexing storage space problem on a Mac boot drive
Post by: howardm on July 09, 2014, 05:06:07 pm
go w/ GrandPerspective.

du output isn't sorted in numerical/size order so it can be hard to sift through the sea of ASCII output.  You may also ahve a
large amount of stuff in .Trash or ~/Library (like emails, caches, etc)
Title: Re: Perplexing storage space problem on a Mac boot drive
Post by: Ellis Vener on July 10, 2014, 04:47:47 pm
Thanks Howard. I have grand perspective but do not use it much. I have already sorted out the .Trash and ~/Library folders.