Help please? i've tried everything :(

Basically, in short, my problem is I am struggling to find out what is taking up so much space on my hard drive. My HDD is 500GB

I have used programs such as Whatsize and Omnidiskweeper to no avail.

It says i have 64GB free and over 200GB in other, in my root folder on my mac "Jake" which contains documents and applications etc, is 235GB

So the 235GB in Jake and 200GB in other plus the space free equals around the 500GB capacity.

Where could all this excess space be hiding?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you everyone.

Did you read the following Sticky Post which describes what could be taking up space on your hard drive in the "other" category? LINK

There is no such thing as "Other" in What Size or Omni Disksweeper... Unless you created a folder called "Other".

You also can't add the size of "Other" shown in About This Mac to the size of your home folder shown in Finder, WhatSize, etc. to come up with a total.

What do you mean by "excess" space?

edit:
And forget whatever you've seen related to storage in About this Mac in 10.7 - 10.9: it is less than worthless - need to pretend that you have never seen that and never look at it again...

bobtomay said:

There is no such thing as "Other" in What Size or Omni Disksweeper... Unless you created a folder called "Other".

You also can't add the size of "Other" shown in About This Mac to the size of your home folder shown in Finder, WhatSize, etc. to come up with a total.

What do you mean by "excess" space?

edit:
And forget whatever you've seen related to storage in About this Mac in 10.7 - 10.9: it is less than worthless - need to pretend that you have never seen that and never look at it again...

Click to expand...

hey bobtomay, what i mean by excess space is the 200GB of "Other" stuff, i dont know what it is and where to find it.

I just dont understand if my whole root folder, with applications and everything is only around 250GB, where is all the other storage space going?

@ClarkeFace This might not be relevant to your situation but are you running a laptop with Time Machine backing up your data? If so, be aware that recent versions of Time Machine (OS X 10.7 and higher IIRC) will store "local snapshots" on your laptop's internal drive if the time comes for a backup and it cannot find the drive it is supposed to use for backup.

In normal operation these local snapshots gradually get removed from your drive when you connect to your regular backup drive. This process of freeing up space does not happen immediately and I have yet to see a good description of how many backup cycles need to be completed before the "snapshots" are removed. It can be an issue because some utilities treat the spaces used by local snapshots as free space since the space can be used as needed. Other utilities may not report this information accurately.

ClarkeFace said:

hey bobtomay, what i mean by excess space is the 200GB of "Other" stuff, i dont know what it is and where to find it.

I just dont understand if my whole root folder, with applications and everything is only around 250GB, where is all the other storage space going?

Click to expand...

There is NO SUCH THING as any data called "Other".

Trying to "understand" that sick twisted joke is a humongous waste of time and energy.

My recommendation:

Pretend you have never seen it, never heard of it and never look at it again.

If you want to know "what" data is stored on your drive and how much space it is all taking up, then grab one of the apps provided in the link above.
Go re-read the link above again - I edited and posted some screen shots there this morning.