Disk almost full: "Other Users" takes 75% of space

E

eevee68

Registered
Hello, my drive 2.12 TB Fusion Drive is almost full when "Other Users" take 1.6 TB. There are two users only with total of 130 GB data. I cleaned the drive with CleanMyMac X with little effect. I manually went through all sub-folders in Library and hidden folders (usr, bin, var, ...) and did not find ANY large files. Finder shows 1.82 TB of used space for fusion drive but total sum is around 800 GB only (see the last picture). I did not find any local snapshot files. Time Machine is off at the moment. Any idea where are those mysterious files that eat 1.6 TB of my space?

I have been searching a number of discussions in past three days and found a number of hints. I tried manually remove snapshots etc. Nothing helped.

9516

9517

9518

iMac (27", 2017) 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB Fusion Drive, macOS Catalina 10.15.2
 
Cheryl said:
In the Users folder is a Shared folder. Have you double checked what is in there?
Click to expand...
Thank you for your answer. Yes, two users including Shared contain 415 GB. It is still far from 1.82 TB used on my drive. See the picture below what I have in Shared folder including hidden files/folders. I checked every folder manually by Finder.

9519
 
That 1.82 TB is your entire drive usage. There are invisible files on your drive made invisible so you don't accidentally trash them as they are important to the running of your system.

Is your Time Machine on a separate drive? Are you using the trial version of CleanMyMac or the full paid version?
 
Cheryl said:
That 1.82 TB is your entire drive usage. There are invisible files on your drive made invisible so you don't accidentally trash them as they are important to the running of your system.

Is your Time Machine on a separate drive? Are you using the trial version of CleanMyMac or the full paid version?
Click to expand...

Time Machine is on a separate drive and I switched it off to prevent creating new snapshot files. I used full paid version of CleanMyMac. However, it did not show any large hidden files.

Yes, I know that the MacOS uses hidden system files. However, I have 2 TB drive (it is the second largest drive you can purchase with iMac) and I cannot believe MacOS would normally need 1.6 TB of files important to running the system. It is simply too much. By the way, I think I have a relatively small number of space-consuming non-Mac applications (MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom) installed. However, the drive run out of space three days ago. (Unfortunately, I do not know if the available space decreased slowly or this is a result of the unplanned system shut-down due to loss of power supply.) MS Excel refused to save even a small file (!) and MacOS refused to empty Trash (!) because of "not enough space on the drive". I had to uninstall iMovie, GarageBand, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and delete a bunch of videos to create a free space of 200 GB and keep the system alive. The system recovered a little bit but it still shows 1,38 TB of Other and 338 GB of available space. It announces from time to time "The startup disk si almost full". - I am making a second data backup now and preparing for clean re-install which will take me a day and will make me disappointed of it. Uf.
 
Have you done a restart since you deleted some files?
What version OS X are you running? How much memory do you have installed on the machine?

My suspicion is that the loss of power (which does happen at unplanned times) could be the cause to something grabbing a lot of space.
 
Cheryl said:
Have you done a restart since you deleted some files?
What version OS X are you running? How much memory do you have installed on the machine?

My suspicion is that the loss of power (which does happen at unplanned times) could be the cause to something grabbing a lot of space.
Click to expand...
Restart makes no change.
I have iMac 27" 2017, 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB Fusion Drive, macOS Catalina 10.15.2.
It seems to be my the only hope - that the system is recovering from power loss and it temporarily needs more space for it. Maybe.
 
Cheryl said:
It seems that your problem coincides with the latest update to Catalina. Try downloading the combo update from here:
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2028?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

and install it. There are instances of installing a combo update to correct issues.
Click to expand...

I already have 10.15.2 update (updated some 3-4 days ago). Do you suggest to run the update again?

iMac 27" 2017, 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB Fusion Drive, macOS Catalina 10.15.2
 
eevee68 said:
I already have 10.15.2 update (updated some 3-4 days ago). Do you suggest to run the update again?
Click to expand...

Yes. Doing a combo install will make sure that all the components of several updates gets installed correctly. It will repair a broken or 'borked' update that didn't properly install.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top