unexplained loss of disk storage
There is a process on my MBP that causes a steady, continued loss of disk space no matter how much I delete and I can't find the source.
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.2
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There is a process on my MBP that causes a steady, continued loss of disk space no matter how much I delete and I can't find the source.
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.2
Hello jmarra57,
It sounds like you have data on Mac taking space that you are unable to find.
Here's a resource on this topic. Use How to free up storage space on your Mac to learn how to see what is taking up space on your Mac and manage it.
You can also try to locate what folders are taking up the most storage by selecting Go > Home in Finder and getting summery info, Get file, folder, and disk information on Mac for each folder. In Get Info, you will see the file size on the top right. In some cases it may take some time to calculate. Once you locate a particular folder, you can then open that folder and repeat the same steps to help isolate where this is located.
Hope this helps,
Have a good day.
jmarra57,
Thanks for the additional information. The information under System should be Apple files that account for your system. You would want to see if the data calculated under Other is from your files that did not fall into one of the top categories for some reason.
The best way to isolate that is by calculating your folders with the previous steps. Staring at your Home folder, you should see all of your core folders such as Documents, Downloads, Movies, Pictures and even iCloud Drive (Archives) if you have one. Once you calculate the size of these folders, if one seems larger than expected, open that folder and calculate these sets of folders. Keep going until you can find it.
If you are unable to isolate the folder or file causing that, you may want to Contact Apple Support.
Have a great week.
Thanks Bruce_P7,
I was aware of that dialog but as you can see from the screen shot, some process is storing over 100GB in the 'Other' category and it continues to grow.
There isn't a particularly useful information about this category, except that the contents are managed by macOS
Thanks for all the help and suggestions, in the end I made a backup of the important data and did a full reinstall of macOS and that fixed it.
unexplained loss of disk storage