Disk files changing significantly

Question

Level 4

1,201 points

Disk files changing significantly

After installing ML in July I noticed that disk files as reported by Disk Utility went from a few hundred thousand to over 900k which surprised me. Also the incremental clone time using SuperDuper went from about 5 minutes to 18 minutes.

To address the large increase in the number of files I used a program to purge all the non English localizations which reduced the 900k to about 700k. Then out of curiosity I started monitoring the disk file count every day. To my total suprise the file count went from about 700k to about 270k (See Graph).

I haven't done anything that would significantly impact this. Also my total disk has remained constant Used: 30.4G, Capacity: 640G .

Any thought on what is going on here?

Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Sep 7, 2012 11:31 AM

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Answer 1

RobertJ Author

Level 4

1,201 points

Sep 8, 2012 1:30 PM in response to RobertJ

In another forum it was suggested that the files may be "snapshots". That is not possible since

Snapshots are not created on a desk top
I don't use Time Machine

Still a major mystery.

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Answer 2

RobertJ Author

Level 4

1,201 points

Sep 9, 2012 11:12 AM in response to RobertJ

To provide the entire disk file count history since installing ML, I went back and plotted it all including when I removed non-English localizations. Here it is

have tried on a few other forums and no one has a clue.

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Answer 3

cozar

Level 2

347 points

Sep 9, 2012 11:33 AM in response to RobertJ

I used Onyx to clean system caches and the number of files went down from 621.000 to 278.000. So, no surprises.

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Answer 4

RobertJ Author

Level 4

1,201 points

Sep 9, 2012 12:23 PM in response to cozar

@cozar,

Interesting thought; however, I never ran a cache cleaning program. In addition while the number of files dropped from about 800k to about 290k over a six day period, the disk space used remained at 30.4G. With over 500k files removed I would have expected to see at least 1G+ or more of spaced opened.

With 510k files removed and the space remaining at 30.4G (indicating less than 100M was removed), the average file size of removed files would be less than 200 bytes. From my experience cache files are usually between about 10k and 80k bytes.

Still a mystery.

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