Macintosh HD full

Hi!

I just noticed that my Macintosh HD is almost full - activity monitor shows that 988 GB out of 1TB is utilized. This surprises me because practically all my projects are saved to other disk. And I don't know how to find what exactly is taking the space on my Macintosh HD. Can you please help with guidance? I have a limited number of programs which should not take much space. May be my FCPX configuration is set to save the render files on my Macintosh HD?

Thanks!

Select your user folder and check the size first.
If it is covering a huge amount of data press cmd-J and check the size radio button,
Wait a while till all file and folder sizes are calculated.
Then sort by size and go from there.

- Andreas

Yikes - that's scarily full. There are several things you can do.

1. Back up! Seriously, a drive that full is a disaster waiting to happen. Clone the drive, if you can (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper are handy here).
2. Boot from the recovery partition (hold alt/option on boot), launch Disk Utility, and repair the drive. Occasionally it'll find 'invalid free block count' which is usually trivial, but just this week my MacBook Pro recovered 35Gb of space on a 250Gb SSD.
3. Reboot normally, then use Daisy Disk or OmniDiskSweeper to find large files.

It's unlikely to be an FCPX render files issue, but either of the apps should help you find the real culprit. OmniDiskSweeper is free but very simple; Daisy Disk isn't free but is a work of art and plain fun to use.

One thought: don't be too quick to jump to conclusions if you're unfamiliar with the view of your Mac's filespace offered by these tools. For example, it's perfectly normal to have a file in /private/var that's the same size as your installed RAM, that's how one of the power suspend modes works. It can look alarming in the tables or in Daisy Disk's sector plot, but your problem is more likely to be 200Gb of backup files elsewhere.

Speaking of which: having Time Machine enabled without a backup disk attached does some weird in-place "MobileBackup" thing which can eat lots of space. Once you've connected the backup drive it usually sorts itself out, though it can take a couple of backup cycles to really get its act together.

A few things to try

. Check local snapshot for Timemachine

support.apple.com/kb/PH14329

- Find large files (somewhere in the middle of this doc)

support.apple.com/kb/PH13806

- In case you have your render files on the local drive

support.apple.com/kb/PH12704?viewlocale=en_US

Good luck finding the culprit!

If you run After Effects, check your ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/After Effects folder. I noticed I was using a lot of space and this cache folder was 120GB!

Here's a link on cleaning that up:
creativedojo.net/clean-after-effects-disk-cache/

I know this is a slightly old question, but there's a GREAT utility I've been using for years to show you visually what is taking up space on your drives. Invaluable when your trying to decide "what can I delete" or how big is this or that:

www.derlien.com

Have you checked when the app is closed too? Double check you don't have an old plugin that's eating memory and your swap file is growing super huge - that was my problem.