SSD filling up for no reason and crashing

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Level 1

5 points

SSD filling up for no reason and crashing

I'm running High Sierra on a 2009 Mac Pro. My system disk is a 1TB SSD. I normally have it about 75% full.

I noticed it was surprisingly almost full so I did some spring cleaning and emptied the trash. I must have cleared about 250GB. The drive still showed with only around 45GB available though.

What's even more troubling though is that I've noticed the available space dropping incrementally over time. For example, this morning it was around 40GB available and 3 hours or so later that's dropped to 37.74GB.

What's making things even harder is that every time I try to "manage" storage to see what's going on, the computer will inevitably crash after a short while.

I can see that "System" is taking up 307GB which seems overly large but I'm not sure exactly what to do about it.

I tried running Omni Disk Sweeper but once it gets to about 187GB through, again the computer crashes.

It seems to be working fairly normally otherwise (if a little slow) and doesn't crash using other applications. I've also run a scan with Malwarebytes but no problems showing.

Can anybody offer any suggestions for next steps?

Mac Pro, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jun 25, 2021 4:01 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,423 points

Jun 28, 2021 6:54 AM in response to idolamore

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

EtreCheck is a FREE simple little diagnostic tool to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. It will not display any personal info.

https://www.etrecheck.com/

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

Whew, they've changed pastebin & made it harder, but after pasting in, click Create new paste button, then Embed button, then copy the URL...

The important part of the above is...

https://pastebin.com/embed_js/KuvnghqA

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck. In a Reply before you click post, look for this to add longer texts...

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Answer 2

idolamore Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 16, 2021 4:39 AM in response to idolamore

Update for anyone with similar issues:

The problem turned out to be local snapshots created by Carbon Copy Cloner over a period of about a year which were taking up over 500GB of space. I've now deleted them and have my available storage intact once again.

https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/leveraging-snapshots-on-apfs-volumes

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Answer 3

Eau Rouge

Level 8

42,602 points

Jun 25, 2021 5:06 AM in response to idolamore

Where are you getting this information from, is it About This Mac> Storage, if so the information in there is often wrong.

Try rebuilding the Spotlight index,

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

Move the Macintosh HD (or the name you gave your disk) in to the Privacy panel.

Quit System Preferences.

Open System Preferences> Spotlight> Privacy highlight Macintosh HD and press the minus button.

The mac will start rebuilding the Spotlight index.

Check by clicking on Spotlight in the menubar and enter a word, if it is indexing you should see a progress bar.

You can also use the Terminal app in your Applications> Utilities folder to force Spotlight to reindex.

Open Terminal.

Enter this command,

sudo mdutil -E <drag the icon of the drive you want to reindex here>

(make sure there is a space after the E.)

enter your Password.

(what you type will not be repeated on screen)

press Return

Terminal will confirm if indexing is enabled on the Volume/ drive and after a few seconds

Spotlight should begin reindexing.

To confirm click on the Spotlight icon in the menubar, type in a word, if there is a progress bar, Spotlight is indexing.

If re-indexing has not solved your problem then try running Omnidisksweeper again, this will give an accurate account

of the storage used. When the app has created its overview you can look at

the Users folder in the output and see what each user has stored, you can then delete files from there.

Do not delete any files or folders in any System or Library folders or any files you do not understand.

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Answer 4

idolamore Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 28, 2021 3:57 AM in response to Eau Rouge

I tried rebuilding the Spotlight index, but the disk still shows as c.40GB available space in About This Mac, Finder and Get Info.

Interestingly, I did a fresh back-up to an external disk and it copied about 420Gb so that means there should be well over 500Gb of available space.

The available storage amount seems to have stabilised at around 40Gb and doesn't seem to be going inexorably down as before which was the most worrying aspect, though it still fluctuates.

I've tried running OmniDiskSweeper again, but the system just crashes every time so clearly something is wrong, but I just can't figure out what! In other aspects, the computer appears to be working ok, so I don't know whether to just ignore the problem or if I need to do some more digging?

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