Help - Disk Space disappearing before my eyes! Not time machine...

[Tmonk_1000]

Hi, Something is being constantly written to my hard drive and I can't figure out what it is or how to stop it.

Running OS 11.3.1 on a MBP 16" 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 1TB drive.

I was on the phone with Apple and ran thru all of their diagnostics and still no change.

I thought maybe it was icloud but it still happens when I'm not connected to the internet. No Dropbox or TimeMachine in the BG.

I ran "sudo du -cxhd 1 /" in the terminal and got :

730G /System

So I dove deeper into system folders and wound up here:

640 /System/Volumes/Data/Users

When I tried to dive into that I got:

du: /System/Data/Users: No such file or directory

Upon doing "get info" on the system folder it shows up as 19.38 Gb so a big mismatch there.

The end of the road and not sure what to do?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Honza1]

Looking at your picture and text, the obvious thing is that there is no /System/Data/Users, the one having 640GB is /System/Volumes/Data/Users, as you correctly pointed wrote two lines above.
try du with proper path. But, I have no clue where is your space. Make sure you have backup and you may need to wipe and restore the system. Something looks wonky.

 

[ptfuzi]

Do you see any process writing on the disk with activity manager?

 

[svenmany]

Just to make sure you know this...

/System/Volumes/Data

is just the mount point of your normal, writable volume, within the unwritable System volume. ("mount point" is probably not the correct terminology)

/System/Volumes/Data/Users is really just /Users.

 

[HDFan]

1. You can go into Activity Monitor, select the Disk tab, and sort by bytes read or written. This could show you which process is causing disk activity.

2. Your storage diagram shows only 50 GB free out of 1 TB. You should have 20-30% free. This can affect disk performance.