Please help! System files taking up 335GB of space!

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Please help! System files taking up 335GB of space!

One evening recently after an update to 10.13.6 I keep getting errors about the disk space almost used up. I watched as gigabytes of space disappeared quickly. My system files are now taking up 335 GB of space. How can I free that up again?

From all my research, I suspect it has to do with Time Machine. I just can't seem to figure out how to restore the free space again.

I have emptied trash, used Dr. Cleaner, refreshed Spotlight, but we are talking about 200GB that should be freed up. Any advice? See images below.

[Image Edited by Host to Remove Personal Information]

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Aug 4, 2018 6:29 PM

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Answer 1

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jrcannon Author

Level 1

11 points

Aug 4, 2018 7:57 PM in response to leroydouglas

I figured it out.

This helped: sudo du -h -d 1 /

I was able to find under Libary/Application Support

The file for Carbonite was over 200GB

From further research apparently FileVault can prevent Carbonite backups from working fine.

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Answer 2

Aug 4, 2018 7:28 PM in response to jrcannon

Did you try reindexing your Spotlight search.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

From terminal you can get a look at file size:

File size, missing GB

sudo du -h -d 1 /

will list the items in root with the sizes, including invisible items.

sudo du -h -d 1 ~/

will list the items in the home folder with the sizes, including invisible items.

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Answer 3

jrcannon Author

Level 1

11 points

Aug 4, 2018 7:37 PM in response to leroydouglas

Reindexing Spotlight doesn't do much of anything. Already tried that.

sudo du -h -d 1 /

revealed my /Library to be 221 GB

/private is 4.1GB and has some folders under /private/var/folders/ that have lots of files. What are those?

Isn't /Library a bit large? How do I reduce that?

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Answer 4

Aug 4, 2018 8:05 PM in response to jrcannon

jrcannon wrote:

This helped: sudo du -h -d 1 /

I was able to find under Libary/Application Support

The file for Carbonite was over 200GB

Good computing jrcannon ! I am glad this was at least helpful.

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Answer 5

Aug 4, 2018 7:07 PM in response to jrcannon

Typically not a good idea to post your SN in the clear.

here is your second img for the record:

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Answer 6

jrcannon Author

Level 1

11 points

Aug 4, 2018 7:09 PM in response to leroydouglas

How do I edit my post? It's not obvious.

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Answer 7

Aug 4, 2018 7:10 PM in response to jrcannon

Ill see what we can do on this end.

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Please help! System files taking up 335GB of space!

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