Storage got full, but not able to identify which folder/files taking those space

I use DaisyDisk, if you run it "as administrator," it will absolutely tell you exactly how your space is being utilized.

Going back to your original post,

"project files and applications (e.g. Docker, VS code, Adobe Illustrator, XCode, etc), should not exceed 200GB ... Mac system files ... should take another 100GB. So, as per the rough estimation, the total storage space used should be near 300GB."

Adobe software can take up lots of space, some of it making use of "scratch" or "temporary" storage. I have seen my daughter, a photographer, use up more than 200 GB in temporary storage with Lightroom and Photoshop running (all the image files themselves are kept on external drives, so those don't count here).

Are you running regular Time Machine backups? Sometimes Time Machine snapshots accumulate when Time Machine is not run frequently and those can be quite large.

Your "Documents" category looks to be holding most of the storage. Unfortunately, in this type of Mac OS accounting, as Etresoft pointed out, "Documents" can include any files associated with software and apps, and they can be scattered almost anywhere, not just in your Documents folder.

Excellent work solving your problem!

When I ran DaisyDisk it found 90 GB of iPhone backups that I had forgotten about. I don't want to delete them but it explained where some disk space had "disappeared" to.

Nothing about storage that you see in the Finder is reliable.

You will need to download a 3rd party storage management tool. They will show you in a pie chart or similar where your storage is being used.

Be careful with any "Library" folder. If you delete a file that you didn't create, you risk unrecoverable data loss. Focus on big files - 10 GB+. Sometimes people spend a lot of time trying to delete apps or tiny preference files.

Also note that as you delete files, your free storage will go down. It may take a day or so for the system file deleter to finally delete your files.

muntaha_ibn_ahmed wrote:

Hmm, I see. can you suggest me any free "3rd party storage management tool"?

I cannot, because I develop an app that has this feature and I can't post links to my own software.

I would tackle reducing your documents as it's taking up the majority of the space on the 512GB SSD.

In the storage screen look below for Documents. Click the ⓘ icon to the far right of Documents.

That will list all your documents. Click on the size column heading to sort by size. See if you spot large items you can delete. Could be disk images, ISOs, mobile phone backups, old simulators, etc.

Move archival documents to an external disk, NAS, network share, or one of the many Cloud services.

In Finder you can enable the following columns. Date Created, Date Modified, Date Last Opened, and Date Added which can help you determine if you really need to keep some files that might go back years. Change the sort order as you browse the files in Finder.

Next time you buy a Mac choose more internal storage.

Anything in your recycle bin?

Grand perspective

https://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

TIP: In Finder you can show dotfiles by pressing the following key shortcut:

⌘ + ⇧ + period