300 GB Unaccounted for

rickself

Registered
Good morning - I have a 320Gb hard drive in Bay 4 of my MacPro5,1 that I'm trying to turn into a back up startup drive. I thought that I had pretty much cleared everything off of the drive so I only have an empty Users folder that I can't delete. This drive did at one time have the Sierrra OS installed but I moved everything to another drive. The drive shows 30gb available, with 290gb used but not accounted for. Is there a trick or some utility that can show me the hidden files that are using up most of this drive? I don't want to just nuke and pave without knowing what I may be nuking away.
Thanks -
Rick
 
I did just find an article about hitting command + shift + period to show hidden files. There is a folder called "cores" that has 289 GB of stuff. Now the follow-up question is - What are the core files that are using all of this from?
 
I don't have a Mac that has anything inside the "Cores" folder. It's simply empty.
Can you tell what kind of files you have inside that Cores folder?
If they are all Core.xxxxxxxx - then you can read this Apple support community page- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7852353
That shows you a terminal command that you can use to delete those core dump files.
And that page says that those core dump files are only useful if you are a developer, or are testing software for a developer.
They are core dumps, mostly used to troubleshoot/diagnose problems in software. If you are not a developer, then you would have no need to keep those files.
 
I don't have a Mac that has anything inside the "Cores" folder. It's simply empty.
Can you tell what kind of files you have inside that Cores folder?
If they are all Core.xxxxxxxx - then you can read this Apple support community page- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7852353
That shows you a terminal command that you can use to delete those core dump files.
And that page says that those core dump files are only useful if you are a developer, or are testing software for a developer.
They are core dumps, mostly used to troubleshoot/diagnose problems in software. If you are not a developer, then you would have no need to keep those files.
Thanks, DeltaMac. These files were taking up HUGE chunks of space. My Mojave startup disk had over 500GB of core files. That's half of the hard drive!
 
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