Disk Space Disappearing

Have you rebooted recently to clear out temporary cache and swap files? Also you can try to reindex the drive as described in this Apple document: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support

Thank you for patiently taking us through the issues you were having. All of this sounds so eerily familiar to me I've also begun searching for a solution to what sounds like the same problem you had.

I am a designer who manages large print files (packaging, etc) on my MacBook. A few weeks ago I noticed I was nearing half my HD space, so I began to manually backup projects onto an external. I had the exact same problem you did... removing files did not clear up HD space. In the meantime I am now down to only 50G free and have 290G of "Other" because I think my attempt to clean up HD space has made this problem worse. The only thing I have done in addition is to turn off time capsule AND wipe local backups through a command window. That took my "Other" space down from 336G to 290G but strangely didn't free up any more room.

I got to the point this afternoon where I can no longer expand large zip files and I am out of HD space. I have done nearly every step you attempted in October to try and fix this but I'm afraid my next step is wiping my HD.

Has anyone developed any additional solutions since October?

For anyone else experiencing this disappearing HD space issue... I finally found the solution!

/.MobileBackups.trash

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/44877/gigabytes-of-disk-space-shown-as- hidden-space-in-daisydisk/218614#218614

HEY I FOUND THE ANSWER!!!!

It's apples new versioning system. If you have any apps using that, it will eat up all your harddrive space. I just free'd up over 150 gigs!

Check out this article:

https://goo.gl/G4lKYK

And the solution from the comments here:

https://goo.gl/38T2iw

Would be nice if apple would make this more obvious and even nicer if they would allow us to set the versioning location to an external drive. However, as long as you use dropbox or something like that you dont need the versioning system anyway.

Extra bonus: That data also takes up space from your iOS devices since its all linked to icloud. After fixing this, back up your iphone to itunes, erase all its content and settings, then restore. Youll see more space on your device 🙂

Here's what my storage looks like now 😀

vm - about 1GB and inside is a "sleep image" - I take it that's for Time Machine.

No, the sleepimage file is a snapshot of the contents of memory (RAM), used with the 'safesleep' hibernate feature when a Mac has to kill power to RAM during sleep. If you are interested, the pmset man page has some info about that (but don't get your hopes up about disabling it -- the commands to do that don't seem to work with recent Mac models -- apparently it has something to do with autopoweroff & the "implementation of Lot 6 to the European Energy-related Products Directive").

You also should be seeing one or more 'swapfiles' in /private/var/vm/. These are where virtual memory (paged out chunks of RAM) are stored. They vary in size & number depending on the amount of RAM installed & how much data needs to be paged out.

A few things to consider:

• From the What are Local Snapshots link Old Toad provided, note the following (emphasis added) ...

Unlike "normal" Time Machine backups to an external volume, Local Snapshots are not extra copies of a file.

... and the several places that say "nothing in the size column is meaningful" regarding the MobileBackups folder. It means exactly what it says -- any size data you see there should be disregarded because it may include space used by files that actually are stored elsewhere. Also note that it says "You'll see the same structure as for Time Machine backups on a separate volume ..." That structure does not use disk space the way it appears to in Finder. That is because it uses hard links to save space. For a detailed discussion of how that works (& why you can't just add up the space used by each time stamped backup to get anything meaningful) see How Time Machine Works its Magic from the same source.

• The Volumes folder is not really a folder in the normal sense. It is the mount point for all attached (mounted) volumes other than the startup volume. (You can see this in Disk Utility by selecting a volume on a mounted external drive. Look at the info in the first line at bottom of the window where it says "Mount Point.") By convention, the startup drive (usually named Macintosh HD) will appear there as well, although its actual mount point is "/" -- the root level of the directory structure. Note that a Finder display of /Volumes will show the startup drive listed as an alias & its size to be one byte.

So basically, nothing you see in /Volumes accurately represents space used on your startup volume. Any assumptions you make based on that will be wrong.

• As explained in About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support Time Machine creates and retains local snapshots only when there is plenty of free space on your startup drive. They will be deleted as needed when that space is needed by something else -- in that sense they are just temporary files. Even when there is adequate space they will be consolidated over time such that you will end up with only one snapshot per day (not one for every hourly local backup) & just one weekly snapshot is saved over the longer term. Also remember from the above that the actual size of these snapshots is not what it appears to be.

• From the same Apple article, note that Finder and Get Info windows do not include the space used by local snapshots in their calculations. To see the space they use, refer to the About This Mac > Storage or Disk Utility graphic display of the space used on the selected drive. The purple "Backups" section of the storage bar shows that space graphically & the text below it displays its numeric size. From your first screen shot, at that time local snapshots were using only about 90 MB, so they are not using significant amounts of space on the startup drive.

•• As a general observation, & with no disrespect intended, you are worrying about things that you do not understand very well, in large part because they are much more complicated than they seem (which is why they are normally hidden). Unless you are seeing some issue that points to inadequate free space on your startup drive as its cause, my advice is to quit worrying about how much space is being used.

Sorcerer2006 wrote:

... but I believe that users should be able to manage their space by adjusting the size and selection of files they choose to store on their hard drive. And I believe they should have tools that can tell them how much available space they have without any hocus-pocus.

You can adjust the selection of files you store on the drive, but not the files that the system stores there, at least not without running the considerable risk of breaking something that can cause serious problems, up to & including data loss or the inability to boot the system normally. It is a very complex OS, with many processes that require considerable study just to understand what they do, much less how or why they do it. In fact, some processes are reserved for the exclusive use of the system's many non-human users, & provide services essential to the normal functioning of the machine.

You are provided with all the tools needed to see how much disk space is available for your use -- that's what the graphics display like in your screen shots shows you. The display is straightforward, explicitly indicating the space used by certain specific types of files & lumping everything else into the "Other" section. Since there are literally dozens of different types of files that are or can be stored in both the user & system domains, it isn't practical (or for some things possible) to break things down further than that. As has been mentioned several times, some directories simply cannot even be read by regular or admin users, or altered or executed by any user other than the one non-human user that provides some low level system service. This is a major part of the security model of Unix & Unix-like systems, & in El Capitan it has been extended even further with the addition of so-called "rootless" System Integrity Protection, which denies write access to some files even by root.

If it helps, you can think of "Other" as "Everything Else," but you won't ever be able to see everything that includes without altering the fundamental way the OS works, at which point you will be on your own, without the support of Apple & taking full responsibility for the consequences of doing so.

As for any problems you might be having with the existing OS, aside from not understanding what is using some of the disk space, what specific problems are you actually seeing? Is the system sluggish, unstable, or anything like that? Do you see frequent application crashes or other error messages in the normal use of your Mac? If not, the only real problem is basically what you might call an intellectual one, which is why there has been so much focus on that.

For that, I suggest you consider browsing through the enormous amount of developer documentation Apple makes available at https://developer.apple.com/resources/ & possibly enrolling in the developer program. (Both free & paid accounts are available). I know of no better way to get insights into the "how & why" of the many facets of OS X.

Storage information from "About This Mac" is often not correct, because it depends on Spotlight, which is not very precise in this regard.

Open a new Finder window, right-click your Macintosh HD -> Get Info and look for "Available". That's just to make sure you have the right figures.

As you may know by now, there are several more top level folders than the four shown in your second screen shot. The normally invisible ones will account for some of the difference in the total of those four vs. the overall total.

Beyond that, folders that you do not have at least read privileges for will always show "zero bytes" regardless of the size of their contents. (You can see this in Finder for example in the subfolders of /private/var -- you will find several folders marked with a red "no entry" badge, each of which will indicate "zero bytes" in Finder & return "permission denied" if you try to get their sizes with a Terminal "ls" command.) The same is true for any other user accounts you might have in /Users/ -- only the folders you have read access for will show their actual size.

This doesn't have anything directly to do with Spotlight -- it is just a consequence of the file system's permissions restrictions. However, About this Mac > Storage, Disk Utility's used/available info, Finder's "Get Info" for the drive itself, etc. will show you accurate aggregate totals because they get that info from the part of the file system that keeps track of used & unused space without regard for what it contains. So the info shown in your first screen shot is accurate, regardless of what adding up folder totals tells you.

As for the shrinking file space issue, that is most likely the result of what is known as "local snapshots," a Time Machine related feature enabled by default on laptop Macs that stores backup "snapshots" of the state of your startup drive locally on the drive itself until the laptop can access an external Time Machine backup drive. That is nothing to be concerned about because even if you don't use an external TM backup drive the OS will automatically purge the space those snapshots use if that space is needed for permanent file storage, like for your document files.