Very little storage after High Sierra

[joeg679]

Before Installing High Sierra, I had about 180 gb free on my drive. After installing it, I now have about 40gb. I did a scan with Omni disk and it looks like Identities is taking up a lot, but System is using 293gb. Also, when I do the Omni Disk scan, I see a number of drives that weren't there before - screenshot attached. Any idea whats going on? Thanks

 

[Rod]

I could be reading this wrong but it appears that Time Machine is backing up to your internal HD. Do you have an external eg USB HD that you backup to?

 

[joeg679]

I could be reading this wrong but it appears that Time Machine is backing up to your internal HD. Do you have an external eg USB HD that you backup to?

I have a time capsule that the computer backs up to and I have an external HD attached to that. The weird thing is now I see two hard drives that now say @snap along with the time machine backups and in the network portion, there is a VM.

 

[Rod]

Are you running parallels? VM is a virtual machine used for running another OS.

 

[joeg679]

Are you running parallels? VM is a virtual machine used for running another OS.

Nope. I don't know how this happened, but I don't run anything else. I have a feeling that the time capsule is doing this. I may have to switch to icloud backup

 

[ashleykaryl]

I had the same problem in my case. Started with about 105 gigs and ended up with about 60 gigs. The only thing that fixed it was a clean install, which incredibly left me with 160 gigs after all the apps had been re-installed.

 

[joeg679]

I had the same problem in my case. Started with about 105 gigs and ended up with about 60 gigs. The only thing that fixed it was a clean install, which incredibly left me with 160 gigs after all the apps had been re-installed.

That's what I think I need to do. I back up to a time capsule, so I should be able to erase the whole computer, then just restore from a backup, correct? Or would that leave me with the same issue because it's just putting the same stuff back on?

 

[ashleykaryl]

You won't know until you try, but I would guess that will likely end up with a duplicate of what you have now. In my case I ended up wiping everything and starting completely from scratch. If you use iCloud, quite a lot will just filter back, but you are removing all the dregs of previous installs. I then installed the apps and set up their preferences one by one.

 

[joeg679]

You won't know until you try, but I would guess that will likely end up with a duplicate of what you have now. In my case I ended up wiping everything and starting completely from scratch. If you use iCloud, quite a lot will just filter back, but you are removing all the dregs of previous installs. I then installed the apps and set up their preferences one by one.

OK, thanks for the info!

 

[harryb2448]

I would suggest also you go the erase and fresh install route. The hard drive looks a real mess.

You do seem to have a lot of TM backups stored on the hard driver. For mine, an external hard drive using cloning software is the go, with say a weekly backup. Both CarbonCopyCloner and SUperDuper run what is called a smart backups which just updates the clone on the external drive, and in an emergency you can boot and run the computer from it.

 

[joeg679]

I would suggest also you go the erase and fresh install route. The hard drive looks a real mess.

You do seem to have a lot of TM backups stored on the hard driver. For mine, an external hard drive using cloning software is the go, with say a weekly backup. Both CarbonCopyCloner and SUperDuper run what is called a smart backups which just updates the clone on the external drive, and in an emergency you can boot and run the computer from it.

Yeah. Curious - why not go with iCloud backup. Any reason other than the $10/month?