Autosave files eating disk space

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Level 1

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Autosave files eating disk space

Hello,

since some time I can watch the disk space of my MacBook being eaten up. After moving files to an external drive to free space it takes only a few days and the disk is full again. I checked with WhatSize, which files are causing this and came up with a 25 GB folder named "Autosave information". within this folder there are lots of subfolders with the suffix ".genstore.noindex" and in there files with the suffix ".pages". A complete path would read:

/Users/username/Library/Autosave Information/676C96D8-E4DC-4B84-8FA2-AF1F7446CA20.genstore.noindex/C4197CBB-49DD -4AF9-AB00-2C930EA12E61.pages

The suffix pages implies that they come from the iWorks suite Pages App, which I used a lot recently. Any idea if the files do belong to Pages or to some other software, if I can delete them without causing trouble and how I can prevent them appearing again?

Many thanks!

Olelai

MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Dec 18, 2013 6:57 AM

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Answer 1

etresoft

Level 8

46,384 points

Dec 18, 2013 7:55 AM in response to Olelai

Do not attempt to delete them. The operating system will delete them automatically if you run low on disk space.

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Answer 2

Olelai Author

Level 1

0 points

Dec 19, 2013 4:58 AM in response to etresoft

Hello etresoft,

thanks for looking into my question.

I wished the OS would delete the files when it runs low on disk space. Instead I get a warning that the start volume is nearly full. After this I can't continue work without deleting files to clear disk space. Meanwhile most of my personal files lie on an external storage due to this and my personal folder is smaller than this autosave folder.

Do you know what would happen if I delete these autosave files manually?

Wiebke

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Answer 3

etresoft

Level 8

46,384 points

Dec 19, 2013 5:45 AM in response to Olelai

If Pages isn't running, you should be able to delete the "/Users/username/Library/Autosave Information" folder. Just make sure you have a backup - especially any Pages documents you want to keep.

That is just to give you some space to work and find out what is going wrong with your system. You should repair your disk permissions and uninstall any antivirus software, cleanup software, or other nonessential system modifications. What version of Pages is this? That path doesn't really look right.

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Answer 4

Olelai Author

Level 1

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Dec 19, 2013 7:17 AM in response to etresoft

Hello etresoft,

Many thanks for your help! In the meantime I opened some of the files and they were old versions of a huge document I worked on recently. As I didn't need those old versions any more I deleted the folder content and freed 25 GB by this. Pages runs well. I work with Pages 09 version 4.3 which I bought some months ago. So it shouldn't be a too old version. The original of the document is on an external drive because of it's size. Pages could not autosave file versions on that drive - that might be the reason for the path it used.

I used Onyx to repair disk permissions and to clean up the system before I posted here in the forum (installed just this week, before I didn't have any type of non standard systems modification software). I will continue searching for the reason of the huge Pages autosave folder as I also think that it shouldn't happen like this. For the interim I know what to do.

Consider this case as closed and again thanks for your help!

Olelai

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