2019 Macbook, continuously losing most of its hard drive space. What's causing this?

[AylmerQc]

My wife's 13" MB with a 121 Gig hdd.
She said she couldn't use it anymore as it became non-responsive.
It showed 320 mb spare on the hard drive.
I cleared lots of jpg and mov files onto an external drive. Emptied the trash.
Upgraded from Monterey to Ventura while at it.
Eventually got to the point where we had 70+ gigs of free space, but a few hours later, it was full again. Only 20 Mb of space.
This goes on, back and forth. When I reboot the MB, the drive has 70 gig free space once again but fills up over a few hours.
Monitoring the drive "info", I see it loses drive space by the minute, 5 gigs in 10 minutes...
What's going on here??

 

[RokinAmerica]

You found out it is not 2001 anymore.

That must be a 128GB drive. Replace it with a larger SSD (and most every SSD will now be larger) and stop worrying.

 

[sublunar]

How much data does your wife have in her iCloud? It could be syncing from it. With the default amount of iCloud storage I probably would struggle with a 256Gb Mac these days as iCloud live syncs Messages - unlike Photos you can't leave them in the cloud on certain devices and keep them all local on others.

 

[AylmerQc]

You found out it is not 2001 anymore.

That must be a 128GB drive. Replace it with a larger SSD (and most every SSD will now be larger) and stop worrying.

Unless I'm mistaken here, I don't believe the hard drives on these MBs are upgradeable...Even so, I'm guessing from what we're seeing that even a HDD twice the size might get filled up without even adding any photos or documents. It just gets filled automatically somehow...

 

[DeltaMac]

What files do you find now, that were not there a few hours ago?
Would probably be helpful to show hidden files, which may make it fairly simple to find new, large files on the drive.
Show hidden files by pressing Shift-Command-. (period)
Hide files again by pressing the same keys a second time.

 

[EugW]

My wife's 13" MB with a 121 Gig hdd.
She said she couldn't use it anymore as it became non-responsive.
It showed 320 mb spare on the hard drive.
I cleared lots of jpg and mov files onto an external drive. Emptied the trash.
Upgraded from Monterey to Ventura while at it.
Eventually got to the point where we had 70+ gigs of free space, but a few hours later, it was full again. Only 20 Mb of space.
This goes on, back and forth. When I reboot the MB, the drive has 70 gig free space once again but fills up over a few hours.
Monitoring the drive "info", I see it loses drive space by the minute, 5 gigs in 10 minutes...
What's going on here??

Part of it may be iCloud stuff being downloaded locally, and part of it could be a rogue program putting junk on the machine.

You can fix it by turning off unused iCloud features and cleaning out the junk, but the problem is a lot of the junk is in hidden weird places. I "fixed" it on one machine by doing a complete macOS re-install. If you do that, just make sure you have all the important data backed up first of course.