Should we be worried about folder Biome, and the BiomeAgent and biomesyncd processes?

Question

Should we be worried about folder Biome, and the BiomeAgent and biomesyncd processes?

I restarted my Intel iMac after a long session of two weeks without any restart. As soon as my system rebooted, I saw that I had only 5 GB available in my hard drive, which usually I keep above 100GB free. I immediately wonder if I had downloaded a lot of content or if my FinalCut Pro renders or anything else had a significant large cache or render files. I didn't see anything. I immediately open many folders/directories with the "Show folder sizes" option and was able to see a Biome folder with about 113 GB stored in there. I am not sure I had ever seen a folder named Biome in my user Library folder (~/Library/Biome/), there is not one in the Main Library folder.

I have found so little information in this Apple community, and not so much on the web, either.

Since my computer could not work well, I took the risk of deleting the whole Biome Folder and force quitting two processes by the name BiomeAgent and biomesyncd. It seems like nothing was affected by my quitting these processes and deleting the folder, then I wonder who do they belong, too? Are there any Apple engineers that can confirm these processes are part of Apple? Can there be bugs that will track more than 2,200 files about every four minutes or so in one day inside the /Users/username/Library/Biome/streams/restricted/MailContent directory, or anywhere inside the Biome folder for that matter??

Anyone else has encounter this issue? It sounds like something is happening in behind the scenes, information is shared, the drive is storing and streaming somewhere or to someone. I'm worried this is a a malware or a Trojan horse, hopefully is just a bug, but I'd like to know directly from someone at Apple, or from anyone with more knowledge.

I'm sharing some screen shots to see if we can get to the answer of this.

This is a very large folder with many consistent set of files stored. Concerning if these are streams, where?

After deleting the Biome folder entirely, and restarting, the folder was rebuilt/reconstructed, alas smaller in size. But here is a view of its structure after restart.

These are the two processes in the Activity Monitor

iMac 27″, macOS 12.3

Posted on Apr 9, 2022 12:59 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

dialabrain

Level 10

124,739 points

Apr 9, 2022 2:40 PM in response to Ludvik Herrera

It's certainly part of the OS. Not sure why it would be so large. The Biome folders on my Monterey installs average about 128MBs.

Reply

Answer 2

OldToad

Level 2

391 points

Apr 9, 2022 1:52 PM in response to Ludvik Herrera

I had something similar with Mail. I was getting enormous Mail folder sizes. Even though I had enough room on my boot drive to house all of my files when I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my 500 GB drive to an external 1TB SSD drive there wasn't enough room.

CCC support found the answer.

"The good news is that filesystem corruption can't be propagated. The bad news, though, is that the corruption won't necessarily stop CCC (or Time Machine, or anything else) from copying redundant content. So, the challenge is going to be in finding the content that is affected by the corruption, and then dealing with the redundancies.

Working with just what we have in front of us, there is one oddity in that screenshot you sent. What is "Data_Rebuild" in that Mail folder? I've never seen that in the depths of Mail folders, and I have spent more time than I care to remember working within those folders. If you exclude that Library > Mail folder from the backup, does that substantively change how much data CCC discovers on the source? Click the Task Filter button at the bottom of the window to reveal the interface for excluding content".

I did a search for the Data_Rebuild folder with the shareware app Find Any File

Name is Data_Rebuild

Is a folder: yes

and got this:

FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.

I looked for the largest folder and deleted it. I also deleted all of the Data_Rebuild folder except for the last one last created and modified. That cleared up the problem.

What was happening was every time I rebuild a mailbox many files would be created increasing the Mail folder size each time.

Reply

Answer 3

etresoft

Level 9

50,722 points

Apr 9, 2022 2:19 PM in response to Ludvik Herrera

Ludvik Herrera wrote:

Are there any Apple engineers that can confirm these processes are part of Apple?

Yes, but you won't find them here.

Can there be bugs that will track more than 2,200 files about every four minutes or so in one day inside the /Users/username/Library/Biome/streams/restricted/MailContent directory, or anywhere inside the Biome folder for that matter??

Certainly.

I'm worried this is a a malware or a Trojan horse, hopefully is just a bug

It's just a bug. The BiomeAgent and biomesyncd tasks are part of the operating system. Obviously they shouldn't take up 113 GB. Sadly, that is the state of Apple system software right now.

Reply

Should we be worried about folder Biome, and the BiomeAgent and biomesyncd processes?

Similar questions