As you can see from the photos below, a lot of mystery space is gone on my HD, taken up by "other" and "movies" according to the storage space -- and when I take a deeper look, I see no movies and two 15 GB copies of "library". Can someone help me square this circle?
MacBook Pro with Retina display
Your pic is too small to see. However, the storage display is only reliable right after the disk has been re-indexed - Spotlight- How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support. Since this can take several hours in some cases you must wait until indexing is complete. Otherwise, do not rely on this display.
There are three Library folders, normally. One in the /System/ folder, one is /Library/ at the disk's root directory, and one is in the user's /Home/ folder. All three are different and should be left entirely alone.
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.]
ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
Install the app in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
security execute-with-privileges /A*/OmniDiskSweeper.app/*/M*/* 2>&-
Launch the built-in Terminal application in any one of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing command-V. You'll be prompted for your login password.
The application window will open behind other open windows. When you scan a volume, the window will eventually show all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
When you're done with the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.
Lots of mystery space taken up on HD
