What is writing this to disk in Activity Monitor?

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Level 7

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What is writing this to disk in Activity Monitor?

I started up my M2 Mac mini, launched Activity Monitor and nothing else.

The computer was left idling for about 30 minutes and to my surprise I saw that Activity Monitor was claiming it had written 4.15 GB in that time.

I put it to sleep for an hour or so only to find that the Data Written was now 10.53 GB.

How can it be writing this large amount of data when the Mac is doing nothing more than ticking over . . . or even less when it's sleeping?

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 21, 2023 10:59 AM

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Answer 1

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Ian R. Brown Author

Level 7

22,247 points

Nov 22, 2023 6:13 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

I have discovered elsewhere (The Lounge) what is causing most of the puzzling events.

To begin with, the numbers didn't add up because I was not showing All Processes.

When that was enabled it showed the 2 main culprits that were a mystery to me at first until it was pointed out that they were for downloading updates and although I had switched off automatic updates I had not switched off download updates.

The 6.6 GB figure is almost identical to the update from Ventura to Sonoma which I guess is sitting somewhere (hidden?) at this very moment on my SSD.

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Answer 2

Ian R. Brown Author

Level 7

22,247 points

Nov 21, 2023 11:19 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

CORRECTION: It appears that I had Safari open but it was just on a "default" type page . . . not YouTube etc. It also appears that iStat Menu was working in the background but we are talking about 5.6 MB not something in the Gigabytes.

What is NewsToday2 ?

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