System Space Hog

I have three Macs, and have virtually the same software on all three of them. On my work laptop, I seem to be gobbling up a lot of hard drive space, and at the moment I'm down to just 38.86 GB of my 500 GB HD, and I can't figure out what is eating up all the space.


I'm a web developer, and every day I download a database backup and deploy the database locally. Each of those DB files is 4GB+, and I open them to make a quick edit in TextEdit, and then run a few commands through Terminal to load the database. And then I delete the file and empty my trash. Every day that stat of available HD space continues to decrease. Just a few weeks ago, I deleted some other large files and unused programs, and got up to 115 GB of available space! Since then, I haven't loaded any new programs or downloaded any other large files. My iMac has pretty much all the same programs and many MORE media files still has 330GB+/500GB. So I believe the process I described earlier in this paragraph is creating some temp files or logs that I simply need to find and delete.


I've attached some screenshots of what I'm seeing regarding my filespace; two from built-in Mac diagnostics, and a scan from OmniDiskSweeper that shows that I'm currently only using 96GB of storage on this computer. What / where are all the other files that are taking up so much of my System space?



MacBook Pro 15″, 10.14

Posted on Aug 20, 2020 7:24 AM

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Aug 20, 2020 8:02 AM in response to shaunwo

Hard Disk usage from "About this Mac" is seldom accurate, and can at times be astronomically wrong.


First I would let the "About" scree stay up for several minutes to see if t resolves. I find that, when About this Mac first opens, there is a big gray bared for "system." After letting it percolate for a while, the big gray bar starts to break up into smaller sections with different labels


The other problem is that that "About" counts some files as System that the Finder and utilities like OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) do not, make that section appear bigger.


However, given that ODS is not seeing anything approaching 350GB, I suspect your Spotlight indexing nipped out to the pub for a pint or six and came home snoggered. Rebuilding that is in this Apple article:


How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support



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System Space Hog

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