I was suddenly hit with an Out of Space warning today after recently upgrading to Catalina. I have 115GB in 'Other' storage. However I cannot see what this data is, why it is so large, nor what I can do to delete any of it.
Can someone help with this? My first goal is to simply figure out what this data is.
All that I can tell you is that Get Info is the most reliable measure of disk space. Also, a 250GB capacity disk has a true formatted capacity as reported in Get Info of about 232GBs. The latter is based on how a computer counts using Base 2 while the former is based on how we count using Base 10. So, your disk has 11GBs of free space out of 232GBs total capacity leaving 221GBs of the disk in use. I don't know what is on your disk, but I wouldn't lose sleep over this. Suffice to say, if it isn't in your Home folder, then don't worry over it. The only stuff you can toss is what is in your Home folder. So look in these folders:
Not all of the folders may be on your computer. Not a big deal. Of these folders the Library folder will contain files and folders installed by apps and macOS. Be careful about what you delete. Personally, I would leave the folder alone. If you wish, you can delete things in the other folders or transfer them for storage on an external disk before deleting them so they won't be lost. Needless to say, the goal is to gain more free space by as much as 10-20GBs.
How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive
Possibly Time Machine snapshots or stuff you have put on the drive. If you are out of storage space, then verify if that's correct.
Get Correct Storage Information
Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.
The categories found in the Storage section of About This Mac is simply an arbitrary way of displaying files on your drive. There are no such categories actually on the drive.
Other is simply made up of files that Spotlight doesn't recognize as belonging in the categories given in About This Mac.
I appreciate the help, but you asked me to verify the data, and I'm trying to do so. I am, indeed, losing sleep over this--I'm getting disk full errors and I cannot determine why it's full!
I am fully aware of the difference between advertised disk space and actual disk space, but the numbers still don't match up. I cannot seem to find about 60 GB of data on my drive. I'm not looking to free up space before I can actually find the data on my drive.
So if anyone has any suggestions on how to determine the discrepancies between my Get Info data (which suggest I'm using ~160 GB) and Finder (and disk full dialogs) which suggests I'm using ~225 GB, I'd love to hear those suggestions.
Thanks for the response! I'm not using Time Machine so there are no backups (I checked just to be sure).
I'm not sure how to verify the space, and I'm getting different numbers from various sources. Get Info on my disk--as you suggested--says I have 11 GB left of 250 GB. However I'm not sure where that is. An OmniDiskSweep run shows only 158 GB used--a discrepancy of 81 GB. Running a Get Info on the folders right off my disk root (Users, Applications, System, Library) also gives me about 158GB of use.
So.. I want to verify the usage, but I cannot seem to actually find the data. I feel like something is being misreported. Any suggestions?
Catalina shows Half of Disk Space taken up by Other
