Disk space disappearing overnight

I'm having the same problem. This morning, the com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnailcache folder was 78 GB with over 200,000 files. The files seem to multiply until they no longer can because the drive is full. So basically, this is computer cancer. Ridiculous. I'd love a solution.

By the way, I'm happy to replace Apple Calendar and Contacts apps. These apps are terribly buggy pieces of junk in recent months. I'm severely disappointed in Apple's so-called quality.

I have this same problem on my rMBP Late 2013 running 10.9.1

Upgraded to 10.9.1 over the weekend but do not remember what my diskspace looked like prior.

I have the 1000GB ssd with 16GB ram.

The com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnailcache files are taking up 768.6 GB of my 999 GB!

Something is not right.

Yeah, none of these sound right. I don't know the solution though - have any of you contacted AppleCare?

I'm getting the same thing. Experimenting shows that the files appear when I enable my iCloud or Google account. I removed all images from my address book entries and still get a large number of files created. The files are all 413 bytes and contain the same thing - An Apple logo.

Some testing...

When I enable my iCloud account, 283 address book entries appear and 644 files are created in ...C/com.apple.AddressBook/com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnailcache. No even division there. Adding a new entry to my iCloud account, the number of files jumps to 672. Adding another and the file count jumps to 700. So... It's looking like 28 file area created per address book entry.

Interestingly 644 / 28 = 23. What's special about those 23 records? However, as another 28 files get added every time I add a new record, what's special about the 621 (644-23) records for them not to have the files created?

Deleting an addressbook entry results in 56 files being created. Quitting the Contacts app doesn't result in a change in the number of files. Restarting the Contacts app resulted in an additional 28 files being created.

No matter what, using the Contacts app results in a large number of files being created in a pretty short space of time.

Same problem here. 112488 files taking up 43G in com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnailcache on OS X 10.9.1. Anybody find a solution?

==update==

It looks like the problem may have been resolved (for me) on December 28. So the solution is likely just to delete these unwanted files and they may not come back anymore.

I can't repro getting the files to be created again following Paul's AdressBook instructions above.

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bryant@Bryants-MacBook-Pro:~> ls -lhtr /private/var/folders/tr/6zpkstq12zs_d_hfrhpd77dh0000gn/C/com.apple.mail/com.app le.AddressBook.thumbnailcache/ | tail -n 15

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 403K Dec 28 10:20 16749EC0-7FB9-4618-9324-833FE72FB272

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 403K Dec 28 10:20 0C38D973-BFAC-446F-A29C-4BF136544D47

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 403K Dec 28 10:20 0911F195-9457-4D45-B34C-1CD507718225

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 403K Dec 28 10:20 01536F5B-DE30-43D8-BEA5-F60BA702273A

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 4.4K Jan 10 17:02 AE476541-4325-403C-ACBC-B04A6F4BBFCE

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 2.8K Jan 10 17:02 554281FF-C458-42AE-A28D-A078722BA644

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 4.4K Jan 10 17:02 4CAF37C9-E3C5-4785-9F02-D05787304C27

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 2.8K Jan 10 17:02 DAEF63B1-421C-4A61-B938-300AD2B45C66

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 4.4K Jan 10 17:02 C5BCD09C-888B-46E5-93D6-3B072F580B1C

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 4.4K Jan 10 17:02 BB5BE064-6427-4A32-978F-2970F610B869

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 2.8K Jan 10 17:02 16E56265-CDB8-4727-B052-6FD99E7DC529

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 2.8K Jan 10 17:02 A06179B9-15DE-44B1-9EB1-40A4E32AFF55

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 2.8K Jan 10 17:02 1057C755-51FF-4B30-B8B2-F62C082EE92A

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 3.9K Jan 10 17:02 C4DC5366-6436-4F55-8D56-76DC70405089

-rw-------@ 1 bryant staff 3.9K Jan 11 17:42 65893519-531C-44D5-B627-4F5CB021397A

I'm pleased to hear it's resolved for you Bryant. I've just checked and I'm still getting the same problem though. 😟

I had the same problem. Each time I made the Contacts application front, it generated a bunch of uneeded files of 413 bytes… 12 GB of garbage.

This seems related to the “On My Mac” local account, not appearing, but containing one useless card (a default card, created at install, with Apple’s office address — and logo ! — in my country).

I was able to solved the problem… here are the steps

1. quit the Contact application
2. empty the com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnailcache folder
3. make this folder “Read Only” to the owner, using “Get Info” from the Finder
4. re-open the Contact application : the “local” account now appears… remove the “unneeded” card
5. quit the Contact application again
6. make this folder back to “Read and Write” to the owner

…and the problem was gone. I hope you will be able to solve it the same way.

This worked for me. Amazing. Can't believe there's a 100+GB memory leak in MacOS.

what I did to resolve it was setup an automator action to locate the folder, grab the contents, and then delete them. (I had to first unhide hidden folders) then I would run this daily to emtpy the folder and then simply empty my trash. I did this for about a week, and then on or around the 28th, I went to run my automator action again and received an error. So I looked and there were no files in the com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnails folder. Looked again the next day, none. So I haven't seen them return.

Thank you Frédéric. I followed your instructions but on making the folder read only and restarting Contacts there was no local account. I quit contacts, made the folder read/write and started Contacts again. This time I saw the local On my Mac account. I deleted the Apple entry, quit Contacts, cleaned up the folder and restarted Contacts again. No more 413 byte files were created.

Thank you for your help.

Cheers

Paul

the only thing that i can think of that may have resolved the issue was when I restored my iphones/ipad around the end of the year. After that, I don't remember seeing the issue again.

I just came up with this problem on a new MacPro 2013 with Mavericks 10.9.1. My com.apple.AddressBook.thumbnails folder had 70 Gb of identical small files with Apple logo. Before following some of the fixes on this site, I called AppleCare and got a very helpful senior advisor. He moved the issue on to Engineering and just now got back to me with the fix which involved logging in as a root user. According to him, this is the correct way to delete the cache and keep it from recurring. And he said that engineering was aware of the issue and that a fix would eventually show up in a software update.

crscrk: Would you mind telling us what the correct approach was? I imagine it was more than simply logging in as root?

In typical Apple style, they still haven't issued a fix for this problem, even though people have been complaining for 3 months now. I doubt we'll see an official fix before the end of 2014, so knowing the recommended way of fixing it would be nice 🙂