"Your disk is almost full" on a new mac

[vonkorff]

Hi,

I am having the following problem. I bought a mac about a month ago, 250 GB hard drive. I have not downloaded any significant amount of software or videos as far as I can think of. However, this morning it said it had 3 GB left. This was hard to believe - I assume if Macs typically filled up after 1 month of use, no one would buy them.

The messages are
1) Yellow "!" triangle: "Your disk is almost full; Save space by optimizing storage" (close / manage)
2) Dropbox symbol: "Your hard drive space is low; Dropbox can't sync until you free some disk space on your computer."

Under apple icon > about this mac > storage, it says "898.5 MG available of 250.79 GB" ... "251 GB flash storage."

Its specs according to "about this mac" are: MacBook Air, 13" 2017; Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Core i5; Memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3; Startup Disk: Macintosh HD; Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB.

When I click "manage", it shows the following disk usage stats:
Applications: 6.53 GB
Documents: 7.69 GB
iBooks: 0
iCloud Drive: 204.66 GB
iOS Files: 0
iTunes: 0
Mail: 0
Messages: 0
Music Creation: 2.55 GB
Photos: 0
Other Users: 582 KB
System: 22.71 GB

It would seem that the problem is the iCloud Drive. So I click on it and "open iCloud preferences."
This leads to a window that says "755.4 MB of 5 GB used."
Below that, there is a bar that says "4.26 GB" and it is about 20% full.

So ... which is it, is my iCloud Drive storing 4.26 GB or is it 204.66 GB? What is using up the 250 GB? Do I really have 250 GB or is it somehow much less?

By the way, my dropbox account online says: "Using 6.53 GB of 1.01 TB"

So, I can't figure out what is taking up all this space.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[vonkorff]

Update: I looked at some links and ended up doing this from Terminal:

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g
(repeating to find the directory with the problem)
ls -la | more

This showed a single 200GB+ file on the Desktop called
205394403328 Mar 29 17:49 .Sub4.1.py.swp

Apparently, this file does not show up in Finder searches, or else I am doing the search wrong.

 

[FNH15]

Update: I looked at some links and ended up doing this from Terminal:

sudo du -d 1 -x -c -g
(repeating to find the directory with the problem)
ls -la | more

This showed a single 200GB+ file on the Desktop called
205394403328 Mar 29 17:49 .Sub4.1.py.swp

Apparently, this file does not show up in Finder searches, or else I am doing the search wrong.

Do you have any Python apps installed? I'm pretty sure that's a Python swap file. You can delete it, though.

 

[Fishrrman]

Also, do you have Time Machine on?
Could the "local snapshots" be eating up disk space?

Try DiskWave (small and free) from here:
DiskWave Homepage

Just download it and open it.
Go to preferences and set it up so that normally-invisible files will be visible.
Then, open DiskWave's window.
You should see what to do next (it's that easy to use).