I'm getting constant Your disk is almost full notifications after purging huge amounts of data from my drive.
I have a 120GB drive on my MacBook Air and have 65 GB of free space by my inspector.
However, the system is somehow eating all of this space and I can't get it back.
Has anyone else seen this and been able to find a resolution where I won't have to rebuild my computer from scratch?
MacBook Air, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), 4GB RAM 120GB HDD mid 2012 13"
That diagram is unreliable and should not be used. The only disk information you need to know is this:
Get Correct Storage Information
Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.
If you are running low on space see the following:
How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive
That diagram is unreliable and should not be used. The only disk information you need to know is this:
Get Correct Storage Information
Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.
If you are running low on space see the following:
How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive
There is but one reliable report that you should go by and that is the Get Info report for the drive as you have posted in the second image above.
If you need to find files that you don't need then follow the guidelines I have already posted. Stay away from all files not located in your Applications and Home folders. There is nothing wrong with your drive. Everything is where it belongs unless you have made changes.
It looks like this was due to a bug, after two weeks and multiple restarts the system released the unused memory and the error stopped occurring.
I have same problem. Console du -shc tell me that I should have around 100GB free disk space. But GUI tools show me only 2GB free space. System take more than 200GB!!! Maybe you found some solution?
Hi Jeff,
About
Hi Happy, thanks for the response but unfortunately none of these suggestions are helpful.
I have thoroughly scoured my hard disk, which had ~20 GB of free space before I started getting this warning. At this point I have 65+ GB of space per my above post. I have included an alternate view (getting info off the hard disk itself) as reference.
There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with my system as it is clearly archiving some sort of cached files I have no access to.
Any input on what is happening with the system disk and it failing to release files it is deleting from the cache would be helpful. As I said, the only solution I can see is reformatting my disk and I'd prefer not to as restoring backups is a hassle.
System eating up disk space
