Viewing 27 posts - 1 through 27 (of 27 total)
  • Mac help- 'others' taking up almost whole hard drive
  • shermer75
    Free Member

    Can anyone help my mum? There is an error message on boot up that says ‘Start-up disk is almost full’. Have deleted internet temp files etc but doesn’t help. There is 1 gig left but can’t add anymore photos. Any ideas?

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    I had a problem a while back where a log file somewhere had gone a bit rogue and grown to epic proportions. Its a few years ago so can’t remember the specifics but it was a ‘hidden file’ so I needed to make hidden files visible in the finder to locate it and delete it

    shermer75
    Free Member

    Sounds like a good start! I’ve looked at the ‘users’ folder and it’s 100GB, but the individual folders within add up to a fraction of that, about 23GB in fact..

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    shermer75
    Free Member

    How do I make hidden files visible?

    darrenspink
    Free Member

    You need to install CleanMyMac, it will show whats taking up the space.

    krixmeister
    Full Member

    The runaway log file per @maccruiskeen would be my first guess as well.

    To make hidden files visible open the Terminal app and type:

    defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

    Then restart the Finder (reboot, or press Option and click Finder in the dock and click Restart).

    To find large files, go to Finder, bring up a search box (Command+F), and then in the filter area (probably says “Kind” right now) click, select Other, double-click File size, then in the next box select “is greater than” and in last drop-down box select “GB”. Then type in some number in the search field – start with greater than 5GB. Your search should look like this:

    Good luck!

    shermer75
    Free Member

    You need to install CleanMyMac, it will show whats taking up the space.

    Tried this, not enough space on the disc to download it! 🙂

    shermer75
    Free Member

    The runaway log file per @maccruiskeen would be my first guess as well.

    To make hidden files visible open the Terminal app and type:

    I’ll try this..

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    Tried this, not enough space on the disc to download it!

    That was the issue for me too – as fast you deleted files to make space the rogue log seemed to swell to fill it

    timmys
    Full Member

    Omni DiskSweeper is a very simple little program to see where your space has gone. Shows hidden files and you can delete them from in the app

    Download seems to only by 2.1 Mb so hopefully you can download it OK;
    https://www.omnigroup.com/more

    slowoldman
    Full Member

    Time Machine (if enabled) creates temporary backup files on the hard drive which are written to the backup disc when connected. Presumably if it never gets backed up they will keep growing. They are hidden files. When I’ve got a minute I’ll see if I can recall where they are.

    slowoldman
    Full Member

    Not got the location yet but:
    Launch Terminal on your Mac laptop.
    Enter the following command into Terminal.
    sudo tmutil disablelocal
    Press Enter

    That will disable time machine and delete local backup files.

    Then check disc space again. If you have loads of space now, there’s your culprit.

    sudo tmutil enablelocal
    will re-enable backups.

    See also

    The Mac “Startup Disk Almost Full” Message and How to Fix It

    retro83
    Free Member

    download daisy disk to a usb stick

    bikebouy
    Free Member

    Likes

    nerd
    Free Member

    If you’re comfortable using the terminal:

    Launch the terminal then type:
    cd /
    sudo du -h | sort -r -h > ~/filesizes.txt

    This will take a long time (it might take over an hour, or even a day!) but once it’s finished you’ll have a list of all the file sizes in your home directory for your entire hard disk.

    Interpreting the file could be difficult as it summarises directories as well as the files.

    jimdubleyou
    Full Member

    I use Grand Perspective for locating massive files.

    It’s pretty lightweight.

    iamtheresurrection
    Full Member

    Opening Finder then hitting Cmnd Shift .[dot] is a quick way to temporarily show hidden files…

    seosamh77
    Free Member

    empty the trash?

    I’d doubt hidden files are likely to take up 100GB of stuff btw, all the hidden .files on a mac are usually tiny.

    slowoldman
    Full Member

    Hidden files might well be tiny but the local backup set (which is also hidden) can be very large. Though I wouldn’t expect them to be that large!

    whitestone
    Free Member

    An alternative to du is ls

    ls -laR | grep -E ‘^[^d]’ > ~/filesizes.txt

    The flags to ls are ‘l’ long format, ‘a’ everything, i.e. include hidden files, ‘R’ recursive, i.e. all subdirectories.

    The grep command is taking that and checking for the directory flag, the -E flag says to exclude those it finds.

    You are then left with just the information about the files which is written to the file.

    There’s no sorting done with this one but you can sort by each folder using ls -laRS

    If you know that the file is above a certain size then you can use –threshold=5M for 5Mb for example

    nach
    Free Member

    jimdubleyou – Member
    I use Grand Perspective for locating massive files.

    Second this, it’s great: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net

    If you download the free version from SourceForge, you might need to ctrl+click>open before OS X will let you run it the first time.

    slowoldman
    Full Member

    Another idea
    Click the Apple icon on the menu bar, click About This Mac, and click the Storage heading

    That will show disk usage split into categories which might be helpful

    bigjim
    Full Member

    “They just work”

    shermer75
    Free Member

    Another idea
    Click the Apple icon on the menu bar, click About This Mac, and click the Storage heading

    That will show disk usage split into categories which might be helpful

    Is that a different thing to what I’ve shown in my original post? Or maybe the picture didn’t work?

    slowoldman
    Full Member

    Erm, yes shermer75. I’ve just revisited this thread and seen your picture for the first time.

    So clearly I’ve spent my time posting bollocks. Sorry.

    Meanwhile, anything useful here?

    What is “Other” Storage Space on Mac & How to Clear It Up

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    Omni disk sweeper is very good

    Does she backup a high capacity iphone / ipad to the mac, if so those files not surprisingly large (eg a 64gb phone uses nearly 64gb-ish to backup). Does she use the mail app and have a lot of old emails with large attachments ?

    As earlier poster says a rouge log file / app could be responsible but it looks a bit odd.

    seosamh77
    Free Member

    Can you see the size of all folders? I know sometimes macs don’t show you and you need to go in a do view options, Calculate all sizes. That’ll let you see where where the largest files are and it’ll show you folder sizes that aren’t listed.

    Looking at the how the disk is divided I doubt things have been getting saved in the standard places.

Viewing 27 posts - 1 through 27 (of 27 total)

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