SSD & MBP Retina Display

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Hi everyone,

Was hoping for some advice on what could be the problem with my 3 month old MBP 15" Retina Display with 500GB SSD.

Checking out the free space on the SSD today, and there's nearly 400GB taken up by the category of 'other' files, but checking out each folder size off the main mac home drive, the total accumulative file size comes to only 100GB... scratching my head where I can find where all this extra space is being taken up.. loathe to wipe my hard drive, it's taken me 3months to get it to where I need it set-up wise... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!!

Many thanks,
Danni :)
 

CrimsonRequiem


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Your Mac's Specs
MBP 2.3 Ghz 4GB RAM 860 GB SSD, iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 32GB RAM, Fusion Drive 1TB
Probably want to use something like Disk Inventory X to see where all your storage space is going.
 
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Thanks Crimson, I've tried that badboy and still doesn't read this mystical data... am pooing myself about having to wipe my drive.. 375GB of a 500GB SSD taken up with this rubbish.. eeeek..
 
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A friend of mine had a similar symptom... turned out is was a bug in Mail.app that was repeatedly duplicating an email over and over and over, until it finally filled his disc.

Deleting that (those) messages and resetting the PRAM solved the problem.
 
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Thanks RiDE - alas hasn't worked for me, thank you for taking the time to reply.. I can't seem to identify which are the email(s) that may be causing me all the grief... god I wish I never started using mac mail with all these issues...
 

chscag

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2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Are you using Time Machine to make backups? And if you are, do you keep the external hard drive attached at all times?
 
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Hi chscag, up until recently I usually kept time machine on, but I did not keep the actual time machine hard drive attached all the time. I have been reading about tm doing snapshots and saving to the local hd when tm is on but no hard drive attached, but I have been told these snapshots are of negligible size, and wouldn't account for 400gb of mystical data..
 

chscag

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I'm not so sure that the "local snapshots" are not taking up a significant amount of space, although I doubt they would amount to 400 GB. Member RIDE could very well be correct in identifying the problem. Disk Inventory X is OK for a free application which will give a picture of what's taking up space on the drive.

However, WhatSize and Daisy Disk are both much better and give a clearer picture of which files are where. Both are pay ware though.
 

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