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I recently purchased a MacBook Pro with retina display less than two week ago. I have never saved anything to the MacBook as all data is stored on an external drive, however, according to the MacBook I only have 6GB of storage remaining. How is that even possible?
Is anyone able to help with this as it appears that I am losing space at about 10GB per day.
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9)
Absolutely no more free space, not a single MB extra was gained.
First, ignore instructions to change the configuration of Time Machine. Those instructions would be wrong even if it had anything to do with your problem, which it doesn't.
Select the icon of your startup volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you renamed it) in the sidebar of a Finder window, and open the Info window. How much space is Available? Specify gigabytes (GB) or megabytes (MB).
Second ignore instruction to keep a useless feature that only fills up drive space.
The only system that feature is enabled on is Mac notebook system. No other Mac uses it for good reason. It is Completely Useless.
Apple Support Communities is a public discussion forum. Your question may draw responses from more than person. Each one speaks only for himself or herself (apart from "Community Specialists," who speak for Apple), and they may disagree among themselves.
All responses should be understood as comments, not as technical support. The fact that someone answers your question doesn't mean that the answer is correct. Some of what passes for advice here is good, some is wrong, and some is, frankly, idiotic. Use caution, do your own research, and make backups before acting on advice from anyone.
Except when acting on direct instructions from Apple Support, never take advice to change the configuration of your Apple product unless you're sure you can reverse that change. If you don't know how to reverse the change, you can't reverse it. Don't assume that anyone here is going to rescue you if you lose data or if a device stops working.
The HD in the info widow has 16.54GB Available
So after you turned off the loacal snapshots you gained 10+GBs of drive space?
As your original Get Ifo windows screen shot shows only 6.xxGBs.
Please post a screen shot of the new Get Info windows for that drive.
Asl post a OmniDiskSweeper window screen shot so we can all see where your space is being used.
marthickman wrote:
The HD in the info widow has 16.54GB Available
Rebuild the Spotlight index. If you try to search now from the magnifying-glass icon in the top right corner of the display, there will be an indication that indexing is in progress.
OK, so heres another screen shoot
The additional space I have gained is down to deleteing the pictures. As I have already explained it is the catergory named other that remains unchanged regardless of anything that I do.
I have tried every single suggestion made here and including the last one of re-indexing and nothing has made any difference to the size of the other folder that continues to get bigger even though I have almost deleted everything off the HD. It seems as soon as space is freed up by deleting something like pictures or movies or apps the space i gained is lost in the section other almost instantly.
Basically, this must be a faulty MacBook Pro I will go into store and get it replaced. I have done some searches in Google and it seems I am not alone this is a very widespread problem.
Added
I have searched a little more and found 36 other people within the apple support community all reporting the same issue. (Clearly a faulty)
I'll take that to mean that you're not interested in continuing this discussion. Good luck.
I am grateful to everyone who has offered advice and would love to find a solution without the need off a visit to the Apple store. If not just for myself but for the other people who are also having the same problem.
I am open to any other suggestions.
Erase the drive and reinstall OSX
Backup first.
OmniDiskSweeper (ODS) can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
If you have more than one user account, make sure you're logged in as an administrator. The administrator account is the one that was created automatically when you first set up the computer.
Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size with the largest at the top. It may take a few minutes for ODS to finish scanning your files.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
When you're done with ODS, quit it and also quit Terminal.
MacBook Pro storage full even though all data stored externally!
