1tb hard drive but listed capacity is only 12gb?

You won't be able to restore from the backup disk while the computer is running - you would have to boot from the install disc and go through the steps to complete the restore.

If babowa has more suggestions for troubleshooting, follow them - perhaps you can get this sorted without having to make a trip to the store!

If you do end up going to the store, bring that backup disk and your install discs so they have everything they need.

Good luck!

~Lyssa

The only way I would know to try to fix this is to erase the entire hard drive and reinstall from scratch. I have absolutely no idea how yours can show these anomalies, I don't think I've ever seen this before. However, let's see if this report might show us something that we haven't seen - it's a little app that will show you your system info, copy and paste it here after it's done (this was developed by one of our contributors here):

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

I'm going to take a guess and say that you might have a log file that's gone crazy (or perhaps a few). The MDS process doesn't need to be chewing up so much CPU most of the time.

This article shows how to look at the log files - you can just post a screenshot of the folder and we can let you know if you should delete anything.

http://pondini.org/OSX/Logs.html

~Lyssa

Use Safe Mode and reboot. It runs a Unix fsck which should clean up any iNode corruption and use Terminal to post a text version of df -h.

Startup key combinations for Intel-based Macs - Apple Support

Frankly, I don't know what these two are as I've not seen those, but they're either a "problem" or "failed":

Problem System Launch Daemons: ℹ️

[not loaded] org.samba.winbindd.plist Support

User Launch Agents: ℹ️

[failed] com.apple.CSConfigDotMacCert-[...]@me.com-SharedServices.Agent.plist

(not that either would have anything to do with the strange disk space problem).

If TM has local snapshots configured which are not being cleaned up, it can fill up the disk. As can email programs that are trying to sync with servers and downloading email (for example Outlook 2011).

I was under the impression that TM only invoked Snapshots on portables? I could be wrong though (I choose not to use it as I prefer bootable clones).

From a Macmini 2011

Well, here is a screenshot of my TM on my 2010 iMac (no mention of local snapshots) and a couple of links to TM articles (both of which mention snapshots on notebooks):

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202301

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

As I said, I don't use it, so I can't be 100% sure; however, the information available appears to point to portables. Having said that, I just checked my 2012 MBP running Yosemite, and the local snapshot option is not showing there either (even though the Apple kb article mentions that it is automatically enabled on notebooks) - I cannot remember if there was something I disabled or not.

It can be enabled or disabled using sudo tmutil enablelocal | disablelocal . I normally turn it off.