New Mac Book Pro Hard Drive full

So I recently purchased two new mac computer, a mac book pro and an iMac. Love them both, but I am having a stupid issue with the mac book pro. My issue is that my harddrive is showing only 25G of space free and there is basicly nothing stored on the computer. No movies, itunes, pictures, basically nothing. I am not exactly sure what is going on but I think there must be some hidden files with copies of files that were transiently on the computer but have since been removed. At one point I was using dropbox to sync and transfer files, but I have since removed it, as well as all of the files. And before you ask, yes I have already deleted the dropbox cache as well as the backup copies in the volumes folder. Oh and yes my trash is empty as is my iphoto trash. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Shawn

If these two computers were just purchased brand new...then contact Apple regarding any "full" hard drive issues. At this point with new computers...Apple should be the first place you should be contacting.

- Nick

Are you using or have you used Time Machine on the MBP?

Are you verifying free space with Finder or with Disk Utility?

Yes I have have the MBP backed up with time machine,

And both finder and my third party app show the hard drive being full, but neither show which file/folder is taking up all the space.

Thanks,

Shawn

What 3rd party app?

Time Machine automatically keeps local backups on Mac notebooks - it does not on desktop Macs.
However, those local backups do not register as taking up any space in Finder while they do in Disk Utility. So, since you are using the Finder to determine the amount of free space, those backups would not be counted as used space.

For an accurate picture of your used space and free space, you must use Disk Utility - not About this Mac nor Finder.

For 3rd party apps, I recommend WhatSize. It allows you to size the drive as administrator which will show you all folders/files on the drive. DiskInventoryX does not have this capability and may not show you everything on the drive.

I was using DiskInventoryX, so I will try WhatSize, but Disk Utility, Finder, and DiskInventoryX all showed about the same amount of Free/Used space.

Thanks,

Shawn

If Finder and Disk Utility are showing the same, then those local Time Machine snapshots are not your issue.

If DiskInventoryX is matching the Disk Utility info, then you just need to browse further into the large folders.

While I advise WhatSize, purchasing it at this point is not going to gain you an advantage in your current situation, aside from being, imho, a better interface and perhaps a little more maneuverable in those folders.

Are you using any Steam games - those can take up huge amounts of space and their applications are neither seen as Applications by OS X nor are they stored in the Applications folder.

>About This Mac > More Info > Storage = What does it say is taking up your space each category is listed? http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

ill have to try that when i get home

Just be aware - About This Mac may give you an idea of what type of data is taking up space, it also does not recognize those local TM snapshots as taking up any space and they will fill a drive until it reaches 80% full.

I'm a big fan of Daisy Disk-- it's got a pretty nice interface for diving into what's on your hard drive.

So I checked with: about this Mac and it showed that I had 180+ gigs of backups on my mbp. I had no idea that back it up to an external would also keep copies on the mbp hard drive. Why does it do that?

Thanks for all the help and ideas.

Shawn

It should offload the backups if you connect to a designated external drive for Time Machine as you did not state what you were using.
If I am away for awhile mine will write to my internal drive as soon as I return home it latches on to my Time Capsule and offloads the backups then my free space is back to normal.

So if I connected my designated backup drive it would have transferred the files from my mbp to the external and as a result the space would have been freed.

Be sure to leave it connected long enough to transfer all the snapshots as you did not state what connection you are using this could take a couple of hours.

180GB of backups would likely take more than two hours to transfer using USB2.

No offense to anyone but this says something about "as designed" as far as Apple's back-up strategy. If the snapshots and other backup strategies take up that much space and take that much effort to work with then something is wrong here and it's not the user. Apple might want to re-think its back-up strategies.

dfwenigma said:

No offense to anyone but this says something about "as designed" as far as Apple's back-up strategy. If the snapshots and other backup strategies take up that much space and take that much effort to work with then something is wrong here and it's not the user. Apple might want to re-think its back-up strategies.

Click to expand...

I only partially agree - possibly disagree more than agree. It is a user's responsibility to learn and understand any particular backup strategy they decide to use. Where I agree is that Apple should do more to educate an end user about the operation of Time Machine when it is turned on than is done.

If those local snapshots are taking up a large amount of disk space, that's not really a Time Machine issue - it's a user issue. Turning on Time Machine and then never reconnecting the external drive to transfer those local snapshots to the backup drive - or the 2nd option - turn Time Machine off during those times when the backup drive is not available - or the 3rd option, which is the option I've taken - turn off local snapshots.

ShaMarFal said:

I am having a stupid issue with the mac book pro. My issue is that my harddrive is showing only 25G of space free and there is basicly nothing stored on the computer.

Click to expand...

There are three things that can really take up a lot of space (several gigabytes each) on your hard drive that aren't obvious.

The first, if you use Time Machine there is the possibility that you are keeping local snapshots of backups on your main drive. That is, when the computer is running, but not connected to its external Time Machine drive, it will try to make TM "snapshots" and save them to the hard drive, then when you re-connect the TM drive, it moves them there.:
Disable Time Machine Local Backups in Mac OS X Lion

The second, is a huge sleep image:
Set newer portable Macs' sleep mode | Macworld

The third is redundant things in Dropbox. Go to the Dropbox gear wheel which is at the bottom right of the Dropbox drop down menu. In the window that opens, choose Advanced. Next to the title Selective Sync: click on Change Settings. Uncheck all the folders/files you do NOT want automatically synced to your computer. Everything in Dropbox will double up on your computer unless you opt out.