Can't find out why "Apps" are listed as taking up 80GB when largest app is 6GB

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Level 1

4 points

Can't find out why "Apps" are listed as taking up 80GB when largest app is 6GB

I have a 120GB Macbook Pro from 2015. I don't usually have many problems with it aside from the rare BSOD, but I just ran out of disk space. It says that 80GB (by far the largest) is taken up by my applications, however when I sort my apps by size, the largest one is League of Legends at roughly 6GB. I have no other games installed and all of the other apps are much smaller. I have no clue what is actually taking up the 65GB or so that is unaccounted for in my apps folder. What should I do?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Jun 25, 2016 1:44 PM

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Answer 1

theratter

Level 4

3,961 points

Jun 25, 2016 1:57 PM in response to nrball

The connection between the largest app on the disk and the sum of all the apps on the disk is illogical. If you are running out of space then see:

How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive

You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
Also, see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
See Where did my Disk Space go?.
Be sure to Empty the Trash to recover the space.
Replace the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
Use OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

[Permission to use part or all of the above has been granted by Kappy, exclusively, to theratter.]

Do not rely on that multi-color storage display in About This Mac. It is quite unreliable unless your disk has been recently indexed: Spotlight- How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support.

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

136,349 points

Jun 25, 2016 2:13 PM in response to nrball

Just to add, using OmniDiskSweeper is a good idea but to make sure it finds all files including invisible files, system files etc., you need to run it from the Terminal.

Copy then Paste this into the Terminal…

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

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