Storage>Other growing exponentially even with a Time Capsule... WHY?

[macnvrbck]

I've searched high and low.

I have a Mid-2013 MacBook Air 256GB with a brand new 2TB Time Capsule. (Created a 240GB partition)

I did a clean install of El Capitan and dragged and dropped JUST the following folders from a bootable backup:

Photos 71GB
iTunes 83GB
Documents 30GB

Apps show 8GB for a total of 192GB. This would leave about 48GB.

See attached screenshots please.

I immeditatly did a time machine backup to my time capsule and have been updating to it.

Within hours I'm down to 15GB of free space.

I've read that TM will to local backups if your Time Capsule isn't available. But I have a proper Time Capsule backup.

Why is 'Other' SO large and why do have 35GB of space created and used in the last few days?

 

[KALLT]

First of all, that storage indicator is unreliable. Secondly, you should look into where all the space actually ends up. To do so, the following Terminal command can provide a quick overview of the space usage of your root directory (has to be run with sudo, as some directories cannot be read otherwise).

sudo du -hxd 1 /

 

[Weaselboy]

I've read that TM will to local backups if your Time Capsule isn't available. But I have a proper Time Capsule backup.

Why is 'Other' SO large and why do have 35GB of space created and used in the last few days?

It will actually save those local snapshots whether you have backed up to the TC or not, so that may be where some of your space is going. If you want just to test, yu can briefly turn Time Machine off then back on and it will zero out that space.

Like KALLT mentioned, that storage readout is notoriously messed up... even more so under El Capitan.

Try running the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight and that will make it better, but it will still be off. Give the reindex a half hour or so to complete.

sudo mdutil -E /

 

[macnvrbck]

First of all, that storage indicator is unreliable. Secondly, you should look into where all the space actually ends up. To do so, the following Terminal command can provide a quick overview of the space usage of your root directory (has to be run with sudo, as some directories cannot be read otherwise).

sudo du -hxd 1 /

Here is the output from this command:

MAC4LIFE:~ mradmin$ sudo du -hxd 1 /

6.0M /.DocumentRevisions-V100

27M /.fseventsd

4.0K /.MobileBackups

443M /.Spotlight-V100

0B /.Trashes

0B /.vol

6.4G /Applications

2.5M /bin

0B /cores

4.5K /dev

1.0K /home

2.2G /Library

1.0K /net

0B /Network

4.1G /private

1.0M /sbin

5.4G /System

189G /Users

394M /usr

4.0K /Volumes

208G /
[doublepost=1452559974][/doublepost]

It will actually save those local snapshots whether you have backed up to the TC or not, so that may be where some of your space is going. If you want just to test, yu can briefly turn Time Machine off then back on and it will zero out that space.

Like KALLT mentioned, that storage readout is notoriously messed up... even more so under El Capitan.

Try running the command below in Terminal to reindex Spotlight and that will make it better, but it will still be off. Give the reindex a half hour or so to complete.

sudo mdutil -E /

I also did the reindexing as suggested above. I'm still missing 35GB.....

Any other advise on losing so much storage space:

 

[macnvrbck]

Anyone have an any new information on this.

I'm now to 8GB free for no reason whatsoever.

 

[JohnDS]

Download and run the freeware DiskWave: https://diskwave.barthe.ph to see what is taking up disk space.

 

[NoBoMac]

Nothing looks odd re: system directories and their sizes, so, seems to be filling up your /Users folder.

You might want to do a "Get Info" on your system disk, to see how different the reading is between "About this Mac" memory report "Get Info". For example on my machine, "Get Info" shows 3GB more space available vs. "About this Mac".

User the Diskwave program provided above. Another option is Omni Disk Sweep: https://www.omnigroup.com/more

And then root around everything under /User. Runaway file-sharing program? Cloud service downloading to your machine copies? Failing program that's filling up some log file with LOTS of messages and not getting cleared? Photo/video editing program making backup copies of originals when editing to create new version?