Macbook Pro M2 hard drive nearly full but nothing to delete

[jworms]

Hi

My 14 inch 2023 Macbook Pro (16GB, M2) apparently has 459GB used of it's 500GB hard drive capacity. The storage calculator says that most of it is in my Documents. But there is nothing in there to warrant taking up that kind of space. I have emptied my trash, my Downloads folder has only about 2GB in it. I need to free up some space but I literally can't find anything to delete.

Has anyone else come across this problem and is anyone able to help me?

Thanks

Jack

 

[Bigwaff]

I have used this app in the past with helpful results...

DaisyDisk, the most popular disk space analyzer

Get a visual breakdown of your disk space in form of an interactive map, reveal the biggest space wasters, and remove them with a simple drag and drop.

daisydiskapp.com

... but I do not have iCloud Drive sync of "Desktop & Documents Folders" enabled.

Are you signed into iCloud and have iCloud Drive enabled along with "Desktop & Documents Folders"?

 

[Fishrrman]

Do you use time machine?
Is you drive getting full of "snapshots"?

I believe you can use Disk Utility to view and delete them.

 

[Teletypewriter]

1. Goto System Settings /iCloud / Manage (shows programs using most disk space)
2. I always check for photos in iMessage that can be deleted
3. I also check for large attachments in Apple Mail that can be deleted.
4. Do you have duplicate or un-needed Apple photos [New feature]
5. Clear your browser history and browser downloads directory.
6. Do you have any unfinished iMovie projects hanging around?

You might consider getting an external SSD drive as your needs exceed the capacity of the laptop, and MAC OS grows larger with every update.

P.S. I bought an external 4TB USB-C drive for my Mac Mini and a 5GB Lacie USB-C drive for my iPad Pro, both formatted with APFS and encrypted.

 

[Ben J.]

Good advice above.
There is often a "Install macOS v…" in the apps folder, it's meant for installing macOS on external disks, thumb drives etc. It is around 10GB and can be safely deleted. You can easily download it again from Apple and others, should you need to.

 

[jworms]

Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated, no luck though.

I don't use iCloud or iMessage or Time Machine, I don't use Apple Photos, and I can't find the Install macOS file. I can't find iCloud either. I've cleared my browser history and I don't use Apple Mail, and I don't use iMovie. I've cleared my Premiere Pro cache.

The storage section of System Settings specifically says I have 306GB in my Documents but it doesn't list any large files.

Baffling.

 

[NoBoMac]

I have 306GB in my Documents but it doesn't list any large files.

Lots of little files will eat up disk space quickly.

Eg, here's a small shell script on my drive, eats up 4K worth of disk. So, lots of files, lots of disk used.

 

[Ben J.]

Download Daisydisk. They have a free fully functional demo.
Run Daisydisk. No installing, just one app to run.
"Scan" your disk. It'll show the top level of your disk. The largest folder on top. Find the 'users' folder, your own user folder, and then the Documents folder. It will show all its folders in descending order in terms of size.

Then you're off. You'll be able to locate large folders, large files, quickly, and you'll be able to delete them. (Use the 'Daisydisk' Collector function, and then you can delete the collected folders right there in Daisydisk.) Often, people can quickly find "Hey it seems I've somehow created a four hour screenshot video of 200GB" or "Hey some Adobe program has made a GB cache folder that I don't need".

 

[jworms]

So I downloaded Daisy Disk and turns out I had loads of Lucid Link cache files that were taking up loads of space from a job I did earlier in the summer. Thanks for the recommendation and thanks for the suggestions.

 

[navaira]

Thank you for the recommendation of DaisyDisk! I’ve just freed 80GB of space by deleting files hidden in *very* unexpected locations…

 

[Ben J.]

Thank you for the recommendation of DaisyDisk! I’ve just freed 80GB of space by deleting files hidden in *very* unexpected locations…

Glad you found it useful.
I encourage anyone finding it useful to buy it at its very modest price.

Btw, I almost never use the 'pie-chart' graphics, I find it easiest to navigate the list to the right, and move back on the horisontal list at the top.

 

[navaira]

Same, the pie-chart graphics look pretty, but apart from that I can’t say they were useful.