Hi guys, this is probably just me being paranoid because I just got this laptop and am exploring it like crazy, but I noticed that my storage space keeps on going down very slightly (0.01-0.02 GB) and fluctuating even when I'm not really doing anything (just browsing a couple web pages). Is this normal or is something wrong? Sorry if this is a dumb question. Not very computer savvy at all. Thank you!
MacBook, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
No it isn't a dumb question. There can be a lot of reasons for this. One of which would be caching the web pages you were browsing. Another is the system could be creating a swap file for swapping RAM memory pages back and forth when you have a lot of applications running. (The system will do this automatically) Also log files are created by applications and the system while you are using Launch the console application and this will show you the messages being logged to the console. Most of which I don't have a clue what they mean. I hope this helps a little.
Thanks for the response! Are these things normal to every computer? Should I be taking steps to fix these or change some settings in order to stop the slow storage drain?
What I explained are normal for every mac computer. It is something specific to a 'Unix' based operating system. Log files are routinely cleaned up by the system without you doing anything at all. One thing I do recommend is to limit how long you keep your history items. At some point your system will stay at a fixed level of disk usage. Assuming you are not creating and saving any files. i.e. log files are being created as recycled at the same rate. Most people will say that you do not need to but I usually restart my computer once every couple of weeks. I believe it will clear out temporary files. I would only be alarmed if you are seeing large free space dropping that you can't account for. Greater than a couple of GB a day or so. Also if you are streaming video on youtube or other places those sites will create temporary files that will take up more space than just browsing a site with static images and text.
OS X also saves versions of files you work on. It means the disk usage will slowly grow over time.
Here is the overview for Lion (I can't see info for 10.11)
OS X Lion: About Auto Save and Versions - Apple Support
The process should delete old versions as free space becomes an issue.
A similar feature is 'local Time Machine snapshots', laptops save changes to the internal disk when the Time Machine backup disk is unavailable. The changes get moved onto a Time Machine backup when it is connected or eventually they are cleared out as space gets tight. You may not be using this feature.
About Time Machine local snapshots - Apple Support
I wouldn't worry about either system, but it may help you understand that many factors are contributing to disk usage.
Drew, that was a great way to describe this. Thanks for the links also.
What you see is a good reason to leave 10 GB-15 GB free at all times on your boot partition.
SSDs need some contiguous chains of blocks to do "wear-leveling" operations ... perform planned moves of data from some block to use other blocks, to prevent over-use data blocks. SSDs get very slow when there is no available pool of datablocks for wear-leveling.
Also OSX has many housekeeping tasks to perform such as swapfile exchanges and cache management. Some have reported their systems refuse to boot if they use every single available data bock on the drive.
Thanks for the responses. But if the storage just keeps going down slightly every like 10 min and not coming back up, wouldn't I just eventually just run out of storage space on my ssd without having actually downloaded anything?
If the pattern continues, yes it will eventually fill up & need you to resolve it but I doubt that will happen unless you keep adding GB's of data & don't think about what you actually need on the Mac. The systems I mentioned should automatically clean themselves up as space is constrained.
You should find that the system 'settles' over time so the disk space should slow down the rate in which it gets used. This is because the OS will store cache files, temporary files, logs etc that Paul Conaway mentioned. These are also managed by the OS & should get rotated, compressed or deleted when not useful. Simply rebooting may alter the figure you see for free disk space (temporary files are removed on reboot).
I suspect you are seeing things that we have simply ignored for years, I personally don't monitor disk usage in the levels you describe. I would be concerned if free space dropped below 20GB or so but otherwise the Mac should be fine.
The OS will warn you when space is becoming critical – sort of like painting yourself into a corner, it becomes difficult to move things around 🙂
Keep an eye on it if it concerns you, you may get used to how it behaves over time.
SSD Storage space keeps going down slightly
