When I opened my MBP this morning I got a 'disk almost full' warning. I had about 15 GB yesterday, I can't think of anything I did that would take up this additional space. I've looked in the folders I worked with, as well as the Downloads folder. I'm using a disk space analyzer to try to find the new files, but its ability to filter by recency is rather limited.
Anyone have strategies for finding most recently added files? I'm on Monterey.
Could be local snapshots. You can see them with Disk Utility:
The files that you have control over are located in the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music and Movies folders. You can use this free app, GrandPerspective, once you have enough room to download and run it to find the largest files on your drive so you can determine if they can be deleted or moved to an external HD for storage.
Note: you can empty the Downloads folder after the apps and/or updates that were downloaded have been installed or applied. Some users have found a couple of Gigabytes of files in their Downloads folder which are no longer needed.
jdredge wrote:
Anyone have strategies for finding most recently added files?
Don't waste your time. Your hard drive is full. It was full yesterday and it's full today.
Start deleting files. Don't delete any files in any hidden folder. Especially don't touch any "Library" folder. This is primarily a caution against most of those "clean up" tools. They can cause catastrophic damage.
Wait.
It will take a day or two for the files to be completely removed. Don't panic. Your hard drive is already full. It's going to take a few days to get any space back. Until then, the computer will be horribly slow, buggy, and crashing left and right. It shouldn't matter through. Then only thing you should be doing with the computer right now is deleting files. If you want to save them, copy them to an external drive. Don't use your Time Machine backup for this. Keep that unplugged for the time being. Copy any files you want to save to a new external drive. You can try iCloud, but only at a later date when you have things under control. Try to make any major changes other than deleting files will only make your life worse.
Once you have about 150-200 GB in free storage, as listed in Disk Utility (and only in Disk Utility), then you'll be OK to resume using your computer again.
I know that 15 GBs is not great--I'm working on that.
Regardless of the total space on my hard drive, finding that a significant amount has disappeared is a problem, and one I'd like to be able to address without just looking for things I can delete. I've seen this happen a couple times before.
FWIW, 15GBs is not enough free space on any size drive.
finding newly added files
