MacBook Disk space disappearing - Please Help!
Hello, I am new to this forum, and I'm not super tech savy, so please be patient with me. I am experiencing a progressive decline in my disk space of my 2012 Mac book pro. I have deleted a lot of things over time and made a lot of space, but the space is easily filled again in very little time and I'm not sure what is causing it as I am not downloading anything new. Yesterday it progressed to jumping from 13GB to 0 in less than 5 minutes multiple times, in which I need to force shut down. This occurs after being on the computer for only about an hour, now only about 30 minutes. My computer will start normally and run fine for a bit, then progress to extreme lag where I pretty much can't do anything, it is happening as I'm typing now. Then the disc space will start to vanish. Something is completely wiping out my disk space right before my eyes. I think I'm running OS Yosemite, but to be honest I don't remember and I'm not sure how to check.I think I'm running OS Yosemite, but to be honest I don't remember and I'm not sure how to check.The computer has been slowing down progressively over the last week as well. Every time I restart, I'm back at 13 GB, but I am running on borrowed time before it disappears again. I am very desperate, I have been doing research and I downloaded the OmniDisk Sweeper, but I'm not sure what is safe to delete from my computer. I think I am running on OS Yosemite, but to be completely honest, I don't remember and I don't know how to check. I have a board exam coming up very soon, and I am really desperate for resolution, Please help!!
Comments
You have a lot of space used in /Users, click on that folder in OmniDisk Sweeper to see what's using most of it. If you were able to move some of that onto an external drive temporarily, that would let you see where the storage is going. It's a good idea to have an external backup drive if you don't have one and this would let you move files off to free up space (ideally move less important files off and have a copy of important files on both drives):
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Portable-External-STEA1000400/dp/B00TKFEEAS/
To maintain a backup, there are apps to make cloned (exact copy) backups (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) or you can just use OS X's Time Machine.
If you have a lot of system memory, the problem might be your laptop trying to write a sleepimage to the disk. You can check system memory amount in the Apple menu > About This Mac. If it only has 4GB, that's probably not what's causing it and you don't really need to do the following but it will still free up some space. The computer tries to make a copy of the system memory onto the internal storage so that it can power down the memory when it goes to sleep. It's called a hibernate mode. You can try disabling this. It involves terminal commands using /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
If you type:
pmset -g
and hit return, that will show you all your laptop power management settings. Hibernate mode will probably be set to 3. To disable this, you would type the following commands in order (you can copy/paste each one), hitting return after each:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage
sudo touch /private/var/vm/sleepimage
sudo chflags uchg /private/var/vm/sleepimage
It will ask for your account password to make those changes. This puts a locked file in place of the sleepimage file so that it can't try to write a hibernate file, which it tries to do even when it's turned off for some reason.
If you have over 8GB RAM, I would recommend disabling the sleepimage. If not, getting an external and copying about 20GB or more of files from /Users e.g iTunes Music and removing it from there once it's copied should let whatever is writing to the internal complete without hitting zero and then OmniDisk Sweeper will let you see where that data is.