Disk Space Disappearing

Thank you. The "available" number I provided above was obtained from two sources. (1) the finder window for the drive "Vision" and the Get Info screen and (2) the About This Mac "Storage" screen. They agree. My best estimate of what I am missing is around 100GB.

Thanks Leo

I don't have Apple Music so when I went into that folder I didn't find the com.apple.iTunes folder at all.

Besides that, I would have seen the 100GB I am seeking if it had been in that folder. The 130GB which is now the size of my missing storage, is not visible via any of the USER or SYSTEM folders that I can see. if it were so easy as finding a folder that had 130GB and shouldn't, I could probably do that.

But if you look above, this 130GB is not hiding in plain sight.

Old Toad

Thanks - yes, I have rebooted, done the ZAP PRAM procedures, and also rebooted on the internet so I could run disk utility and that was OK.

Also I have re-indexed the Spotlight several times.

Also I have a Time Capsule and it appears it has been online and backing up regularly via Time Machine.

RC

thanks.

I'm having trouble believing that what you describe could account for 130GB of space. I don't disagree that I have applications that are probably creating caches and temp files. but when I look these up I see things that are 1GB at most and those are in folders that I can find.

I have run Cocktail several times with no results. The updated Cocktail doesn't do permissions anymore because those are gone, but it does clear system and user logs, clear out cache and temp files for system and user, and clear a number of other things that could have been the potential cause.

What I really need is a way to get a definition of the OTHER files that Spotlight and the finder are looking at. I have 198GB of "OTHER" files and I need to get a list of what those are.

OK, well this isn't necessarily the total fix yet but it is a contributing factor.

RC - you thought that there might not be a global issue - judge for yourself.

I recently placed some folders on iCloud Drive. About 10GB to try to make more space on my primary disk.

Unknown to me, iCloud doesn't move folders even though it says and appears to do that. it "synchronizes" folders - that is, they appear to move from your laptop to the iCloud Drive but a copy, a hidden copy, is retained on your laptop. And iCloud continues to synchronize them. You check your finder and nothing changes - you don't gain any space and in fact, after a few minutes you start losing space big time.

Enter Time Machine. Time Machine "TM" automatically backs up iCloud and it backs up the hidden places where these files continue to be stored.

So for every 1GB file, you get one TM copy from iCloud, one retained on your main disk, and one that gets placed into a backup drive called MobilBackups at the root of your laptop volume and then it gets backed up to Time Capsule (my case is a TC on our network). So you have created 2GB of "Other" storage for the 1GB you thought you removed. And that's not all. Overtime you make a change to those folders, you get another copy in MobilBackups on your drive. Now TC turns on and makes a new snapshot of those files every hour and places them into MobilBackups. So within a very short time, say 10 hours, you have turned a 1GB file into 20GB of lost space on your home disk. Now I transferred 10GB so 10 hours later that had placed almost 200GB into by MobilBackups folder. Now that's something you just can't DELETE - TM doesn't take kindly to deleting its stuff. Some real horror stories come out of people who tried to delete TM files.

If you use iCloud as a backup, then you're essentially always backing up your backup.

Strange thing is - now I have excluded iCloud backups from TM and moved those files back to my main drive and off of iCloud Drive. But all of the files are still piled up in MobilBackups so all that I've done is to stop the decay that was happening when I got down to 95GB on my main 500GB SSD. Good news is that amounts to 80% which is TM's "drop dead" limit - it can't put anything more on your main drive and starts deleting things. But my main disk space is still tied up in that semi-invisible MobilBackups volume. You can look at it by doing a GO /Volumes/MobilBackups via your Finder Menu.

RC

Great research but you're only succeeding in telling me what it's not. I don't have a theory after all this discussion about what is causing my problem.

And the fact that when I removed 10GB of movies, the Other automatically and quickly filled up the 10GB has not been explained by any of these theories.

I did note that when this happened and I went back to Mobilbackups I found many more snapshots listed than were there before. But if this theory doesn't hold up because these files are simply links with no storage impact, then at best I am left without a theory for solving the problem. And I have established that this problem exists on other MBPs - But for those users who have been struggling with this issue, they did not have the systems and software background to establish that something unseen has been grabbing storage space - they only saw the problem as "I got to either eliminate files or get a bigger disk." But when I pointed out that when they deleted or moved files to another disk, their OS just filled in the holes with something else invisible, they suddenly realized that the problem was not what they thought.

I don't mind shooting down theories but if that's all we're doing, then there's a problem because we need an actual theory that leads to a solution.

RC

Regarding Cocktail - very interesting but my comment was really about Cocktail not OSX. Cocktail no long rebuilds permissions as it has for all prior OSX versions. It stopped with version 10.11 and that's fine. it was the others operations that I was interested in anyway and AGAIN, I'm doing this to find a theory that will lead to a solution.

These posts seems to be a little heavy on the intellectual/isn't this interesting side but not leading to a theory for a solution.

RC

to this comment....

"•• 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."

I can appreciate what you're saying and I understand the perspective.

I believe I have a problem. In user terms, I do not have available space that is equal to my total drive size minus the files that I have stored on the drive. And further I do not have control of the available space - ie. if I remove 10GB I still have the same amount of available space.

So it may not be appropriate for me to be looking into files and areas that are hidden for a reason, but given the tools I have at hand, there doesn't seem to be any other way to proceed. If I cannot get control of my SSD as I would have had in any other prior version I've used, and be able to manage my available space then I need to go looking for a solution so that I can.

If you believe that the problem is not a problem from a user perspective, then you're welcome to drop me 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.

Now in real life I'm 70 years old and a Chairman and CEO for several humanitarian foundations. In a former career I was a systems engineer for DEC, HP, NCR, IBM, and several small computer companies. I am determined to solve this problem and I have the resources to make it as visible as I need to in order to get an answer.

Thank you for your understanding. And I took no offense.

RC

regarding booting from recovery partition - yes - I did that some time back but just did it again to make sure. I did not that disk utility show the same available space - 92GB - as I'm seeing in About This Mac/Storage - so those agree. No noticeable change after performing this.