I keep about 150 to 200 GB open on my 1TB hard drive. I installed Sonoma. The next day my drive was full. I purged 50 GB, the next day it was full again. I purged 50 GB, the next day it was full again. on and on. I've seen this elsewhere, and one person attributed it to Google drive. I removed that. Any other ideas?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
After deleting the contents of /private/tmp, I have over 600gb free. I had deleted lots of other files before finding the cause of the issue. I had even moved all of my user files off to a thumb drive.
I read that the macOS is supposed to delete everything in /private/tmp every time you reboot. Is there any reason why ours was filling up like mad and never purging? Bug?
After deleting the contents of /private/tmp, I have over 600gb free. I had deleted lots of other files before finding the cause of the issue. I had even moved all of my user files off to a thumb drive.
I read that the macOS is supposed to delete everything in /private/tmp every time you reboot. Is there any reason why ours was filling up like mad and never purging? Bug?
ok, an app that looks at your largest folders found this one...
Macintosh HD/ private /tmp
used Go > Go to folder > /private/ ...then open tmp folder
It has about 500GB in it. None of the files in there are older than the date I upgraded to Sonoma.
It had hundreds or even thousands of folders that were exactly the same size (94.9MB).
Each one is named with random letters and numbers, and each has these folders inside...
There are probably 400 of that exact Xerox printer 94.3MB folder, each with a different root folder name. Then it does the same thing with our brother printers and so on.
This appears to be what is filling up our hard drive. How do we stop it? See lower image. It is doing this non-stop. We use an app called Printix. I removed that, thinking it might have something to do with this.
This image is when viewed by size:
This is a small segment when viewed by date created.... you can see it is doing this non-stop.
Apple is not here on these forums. We are just other regular users such as yourself assisting people on our own time.
You should open a tech support ticket with Apple Support.
You can also provide Apple with product feedback here (Apple won't respond):
It behaved for a few days, and overnight it filled up 600gb of free space. I always get alerted to the problem when I start getting pop-ups ...like, in photoshop it'll say that my scratch disk is full!
I added a printer 2 days ago, and it didn't fill up the private/tmp folder with usuless huge printer files like it had in the past. Then, yesterday, I changed the name of one printer from something generic (like, "Xerox XYZ200") to something more descriptive (like, "Server Room Printer"). After I changed the name, it seemed to have gone off the rails again.
Apple, are you entering this as a Sonoma bug?
Hard drive fills to capacity without cause after upgrading to macOS 14.
