Updating to High Sierra is causing hard drive to fill up - SOLUTION!

Updating to High Sierra is causing hard drive to fill up.

Ever since updating I have had a problem that it looks like others have had, and it kept getting worse and worse until I had to search for a solution.

I got to the point that when turning on my MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) I would have many GB of available storage, but within seconds I would watch it steadily decrease until there were only about 30 MB left.

There are lots of threads about this with lots of complicated solutions, including turning off Spotlight, reinstalling High Sierra, constantly deleting caches, etc. I tried other things like deleting apps I don't used often and transferring large files away, but almost immediately dhavailalbe storage disappeared.

At one point I did a search for files that were over 1 GB and found a group of files all from today that had long file names that included gmail. Some one on one thread had mentioned that gmail sometimes reloads old messages if there is space available, so I went into account settings for Mail and under Account Information on each of my gmail accounts (I have a bunch) I changed the dropdown next to "Download Attachments" from ALL to RECENT.

That did it! The next time I restarted my MacBook Pro I had way more storage space than I have had in a long time and it seems to be stable! H hope this works for others having similar issues!

So I am guessing that the upgrade to High Sierra changed the default settings for gmail? Anyway, it's working for now!