Hello. I have a similar problem - the file appears to 12GB
I need help in solving this problem!
I would just create a small script that looks in the directory, if file(s) are larger than x, than delete. You can do this in the command line with just two commamds, "ls -ltr" and "rm -rf".
I found the problem and solution sometime ago. In my case, I went to Finder, Show View Options and disabled icon preview as a default setting. Problem solved. OS X was making previews for every file in my computer.
I have 800gb of "other" on a 1 TB drive and as soon as I move files off to another dive the free space fills up with more "other"
Running Omni Disk Sweeper directly from the app didn't help. When I ran it through the terminal by following the instructions below which I found on another forum (which I can't find now) I was able to identify 710GB of .DocumentRevisions - Chunk Storage.
My question is what is this chunk storage and is it safe to delete it?
Text to run in Terminal:
Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click the line of text below to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):
Running Omni Disk Sweeper directly from the app didn't help. When I ran it through the terminal by following the instructions below which I found on another forum (which I can't find now) I was able to identify 710GB of .DocumentRevisions - Chunk Storage.
My question is what is this chunk storage and is it safe to delete it?
Chunk storage is from the system automatically saving changes you make to a document.
If you for example have a 21MB Pages document, it will keep the edits you make to the document. 100 revisions could be 2.1GB for 1 file. With a few documents of similar size, it will add up to a lot of wasted space. Apple should really have a cleanup process to keep the space down because >700GB of wasted space is a bit crazy.
You can delete the whole DocumentRevisions folder or just the folders inside that one. You can just move them to trash first and then open a Pages document and let it save and it should recreate the folder.
I think having auto-revisions is a nice idea but they can surely cull older revisions. The most revisions you'd need are for the same day (every 5 minutes) and then maybe 1 per day for the last week and then 1 per month. Plus, the revisions can be binary differences not file duplicates so in RAM, they'd subtract the binary data of the current revision from the last one and store the change, not a duplicate of the whole file. This makes saves less likely to cause slowdown. They can also compress the differences the same way they compress RAM instead of dropping the files there in uncompressed plain text.
If you open up one of the 21MB chunks in Textedit or use sudo nano and drag one of the documents into the terminal, you can probably figure out what app is saving the documents.
Thanks kindly Marvin, pretty straight forward. Sounds like Apple should have a small ap. in system preferences or utilities where you can control this and dump the trash from time to time. Seems many people have the same problem.
My 2008 MacBook Pro doesn't deem to have out of control files as some have, but I had under 30GB left on my 320GB drive and everything was slow. I couldn't find what was taking all the space, as I keep as much as possible on my external drive.
I found a great fee app called Disk Inventory X
It shows a graphic tree of file sizes that helped me see which files were big, and find them on my hard drive. Turns out that when I upgraded from iPhoto to Photos, all my photo files were copied (about 30GB).. So I backed up and deleted the iPhoto files... Took hours to delete but I only recovered a few GB, and the photos folder magically grew In addition, my virtual machine which I need to run a CAD program for work, is somehow using 114GB. I am sure this is because of VM backups from the snapshots in parallels, but I don't know how to check or get rid of them. I have all codes needed to recreate windows and can reload the program's I use, so with the files stored on my Mac folders, I don't think I need to keep backing up my VM.
Over the last few days I have had an issue with one of my hard drives where it's losing space little by little over time. The first time I noticed it I had 12 gigs free and those vanished over night. I cleaned out some old files and gained about 8 gigs back. Came back 30 min. later and I only had 131 mb. I cleaned off some more stuff right before I recorded this clip and had 9.5 gigs. I recorded this about an hour ago and I currently only have 1.7 on my drive. What could be causing this?
Looking for help!
Over the last few days I have had an issue with one of my hard drives where it's losing space little by little over time. The first time I noticed it I had 12 gigs free and those vanished over night. I cleaned out some old files and gained about 8 gigs back. Came back 30 min. later and I only had 131 mb. I cleaned off some more stuff right before I recorded this clip and had 9.5 gigs. I recorded this about an hour ago and I currently only have 1.7 on my drive. What could be causing this?
@kurtis I had the same problem but I just resolved it! It is an issue with the logs and over populating. Go to the library and open it in finder. Once there click on the gear with a drop down arrow. And near the bottom of that drop down click on Show View Options, near the bottom of that one click on calculate all sizes. Then click on the Gear button again and go to Arrange by and arrange by size. It will take a couple of seconds to populate but the logs folder will come up as the biggest consumer. Delete the contents of the logs folder but NOT the folder itself. Then you should be good.
Comments
I would just create a small script that looks in the directory, if file(s) are larger than x, than delete. You can do this in the command line with just two commamds, "ls -ltr" and "rm -rf".
I have 800gb of "other" on a 1 TB drive and as soon as I move files off to another dive the free space fills up with more "other"
Running Omni Disk Sweeper directly from the app didn't help. When I ran it through the terminal by following the instructions below which I found on another forum (which I can't find now) I was able to identify 710GB of .DocumentRevisions - Chunk Storage.
My question is what is this chunk storage and is it safe to delete it?
Text to run in Terminal:
Install ODS in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click the line of text below to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
Chunk storage is from the system automatically saving changes you make to a document.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202255
If you for example have a 21MB Pages document, it will keep the edits you make to the document. 100 revisions could be 2.1GB for 1 file. With a few documents of similar size, it will add up to a lot of wasted space. Apple should really have a cleanup process to keep the space down because >700GB of wasted space is a bit crazy.
You can delete the whole DocumentRevisions folder or just the folders inside that one. You can just move them to trash first and then open a Pages document and let it save and it should recreate the folder.
I think having auto-revisions is a nice idea but they can surely cull older revisions. The most revisions you'd need are for the same day (every 5 minutes) and then maybe 1 per day for the last week and then 1 per month. Plus, the revisions can be binary differences not file duplicates so in RAM, they'd subtract the binary data of the current revision from the last one and store the change, not a duplicate of the whole file. This makes saves less likely to cause slowdown. They can also compress the differences the same way they compress RAM instead of dropping the files there in uncompressed plain text.
If you open up one of the 21MB chunks in Textedit or use sudo nano and drag one of the documents into the terminal, you can probably figure out what app is saving the documents.
Thanks kindly Marvin, pretty straight forward. Sounds like Apple should have a small ap. in system preferences or utilities where you can control this and dump the trash from time to time. Seems many people have the same problem.
Cheers, T
My 2008 MacBook Pro doesn't deem to have out of control files as some have, but I had under 30GB left on my 320GB drive and everything was slow.
I couldn't find what was taking all the space, as I keep as much as possible on my external drive.
I found a great fee app called Disk Inventory X
It shows a graphic tree of file sizes that helped me see which files were big, and find them on my hard drive.
Turns out that when I upgraded from iPhoto to Photos, all my photo files were copied (about 30GB).. So I backed up and deleted the iPhoto files... Took hours to delete but I only recovered a few GB, and the photos folder magically grew
In addition, my virtual machine which I need to run a CAD program for work, is somehow using 114GB. I am sure this is because of VM backups from the snapshots in parallels, but I don't know how to check or get rid of them. I have all codes needed to recreate windows and can reload the program's I use, so with the files stored on my Mac folders, I don't think I need to keep backing up my VM.
Any ideas?
Looking for help!
Over the last few days I have had an issue with one of my hard drives where it's losing space little by little over time. The first time I noticed it I had 12 gigs free and those vanished over night. I cleaned out some old files and gained about 8 gigs back. Came back 30 min. later and I only had 131 mb. I cleaned off some more stuff right before I recorded this clip and had 9.5 gigs. I recorded this about an hour ago and I currently only have 1.7 on my drive. What could be causing this?
I had the same problem but I just resolved it! It is an issue with the logs and over populating.
Go to the library and open it in finder. Once there click on the gear with a drop down arrow. And near the bottom of that drop down click on Show View Options, near the bottom of that one click on calculate all sizes.
Then click on the Gear button again and go to Arrange by and arrange by size.
It will take a couple of seconds to populate but the logs folder will come up as the biggest consumer. Delete the contents of the logs folder but NOT the folder itself. Then you should be good.