Disk space thief?

srichards

srichards

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Suz
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My mac is driving me mad. It has worked fine for years. I updated to yosemite and the stupid thing is constantly filling the start up disk. I'm having to delete or move some files because something is taking up space somewhere and it's not what I'm doing! Since it started I've not added anything that could just be dumping crap on the disk like this. I finally got around to doubling the memory in the machine as I assumed it was the swap space that might be growing but I'm not using any swap and disk space is still being eaten up with apparently nothing.

First I moved security spy (cctv) thinking it had to be that and made it save everything in the cloud rather than on the local disk. That was then ok for a few weeks. The iphoto/photos library merge decided to duplicate the entire library so that was the cause of another disk filling nightmare when it decided it was going to duplicate the library in the middle of the back up. I deleted the duplicate libraries so then I had about 100GB free of disk. Now I'm down to 23GB and I've already deleted about 15GB over the weekend as it was down to full again on Friday and it is constantly filling the disk with some crap somehow and somewhere.

I cannot find what it is that is taking up the space. I list out big files and they're all mine that have been there for ages.

It's taken 3GB since yesterday. I cannot find where or what it is doing.

Reboot doesn't fix it either as it doesn't seem to remove more than a few GB of what I'm assuming is swap.

I noticed the back ups are getting larger as well which again is odd as the icloud drive isn't included in that so that shouldn't be in the back up. It gained about 200GB for no reason.

Does yosemite do something stupid like cache icloud items locally? It could explain why it is disk filling even though those things are supposed to be on a network drive.

I'm not running anything that I haven't had for years. If I've been taking loads of photos or scanning tons of things in I'd understand getting a full disc but it is becoming annoying. I think it is something to do with security spy but it shouldn't be as all the content should be going onto the networked drive and not stored locally.

Any ideas what this rogue disk space stealer might be?
 
Well, I would start by trying to work out where the space has gone. Using something like "cd /; du -sh *" in a terminal should give you a good start, then cd to each folder and drill down from there if needed with a "du -sh *". Once you know where the space is, you will have a better idea what stole it. I will just quickly point out I am not a mac user though...
 
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Depending on how you use some softwares
(photo-library etc) these may create .lib files
that may reach astronomical numbers… one
of the reasons I never work with libraries.

…and I am a heavy MAC user!
 
It's icloud. I moved a folder onto the cloud. It disappeared off the local drive immediately and was shown where I moved it. Checked disk space, it had gone down. But no it actually doesn't. It keeps a local copy and the icloud information infers if you save direct to icloud it doesn't keep a local copy either! I've been merrily moving stuff on there and security spy has been merrily saving stuff on there so it's been junking up the local disk which was exactly what I wanted to avoid.

The kicker is that it doesn't show any of this in finder. You only know if you do a du and sort it and you then see it's junked up somewhere on the local disk. I'm still not clear whether I can clear those copies off the local disk and whether they'll delete them off the cloud or just re-download them.

Why have a drive that you move things to that doesn't actually move things but tells you it is and leaves these copies behind. Everyone knows the difference between move and copy so why not say when you drag and drop that it is *copying* it to icloud not moving it. You drop a file it immediately disappears from the finder and re-appears in the icloud drive. Seems logical that it has just moved it, not copied it!

I don't know if it is different in el capitan but it seems in yosemite it behaves in a stupid fashion. I also think local copies should be automatically purged if disk space is running out too as again it seems pointless to have this duplication.
 
Glad you found the problem.

I use Windirstat on PC to keep track of where all my disk space is going, and looks like there's a mac version http://www.derlien.com/
 
SecuritySpy seems the most likely culprit but it's not something I know about. What other software do you run that might cause this? Do you have any cloning stuff running, that's caused me problems in the past sticking a dupe on my desktop?
 
Hope you got it all sorted. I've used an app called Omnidisksweeper on my iMac to track down unexpected disk usage - Capture NX2 was hoarding loads of space and this helped me identify it.
 
I'll have a look at omnidisksweeper.

I'm keeping an eye on disk space now. I have deleted all the security spy files that weren't saved directly to icloud. I'll see if the disk space carries on being hoovered up. It will be annoying if it does as it is useful to keep the cctv for a couple of months. Fortunately I can set it to delete stuff if space runs out or just keep X days worth.
 
I wonder if you could set the CCTV to save to a USB drive? But at least you sound like you're on top of things.
 
J Veitch said:
I wonder if you could set the CCTV to save to a USB drive? But at least you sound like you're on top of things.
Click to expand...

I probably could but having it offsite seemed a sensible idea. It stops the place being cluttered up with NAS boxes or external drives. A NAS that could automatically sync with icloud so it would have everything junking it up not the local computer might be another way of doing it but apparently that may not make a difference and it would just copy it all to the mac anyway. It's a dumb way of doing it. I'm sure most people realise that if the internet isn't working they can't get at their networked storage. Instead apple think they'd be too thick to grasp that and would rather have all their disk space eaten up instead.
 
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your mac will make shadow copies of files and it will show as used space, but if another app tries to save it will overwrite it, so you won't actually get any issues

there is a command you can run in terminal to flush it all out and reset the counters

thats what was happening on mine anyway, could never find a permanent fix

the 'other' allocation in storage still fluctuates wildly!
 
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That command would be useful to know. In vms it was purge. I will have to investigate further.
 
I had a similar problem a few months ago. Daisy disk shows around 700gb used on a 1tb drive. Finder reported only around 100gb free.

Omnidisksweeper correctly reported the used space and showed the space was being used by TimeMachine 'mobilbackups'.

I used the following command in terminal to remove:-

Code: 
sudo rm -rf /.MobileBackups.trash[/[code]
 
Fortunately I don't use time machine. May have a go with omnidisksweeper though :thumbs:
 
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