Cruft Eliminator
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wrote on 20 Dec 2020, 17:01 last edited by
I have an external 2 TB SSD that I boot my Mac from. Between photos, docs, etc, I have about 650 gigs of stuff.
Over the last few months, I've noticed my free space going down. It got to the point that I had "only" 650 gigs free - so something was eating up about half a terabyte. Doing a "about this mac" storage revealed that about 800 gig was "other", not music, photos, videos, etc.
I searched all the usual sites about what could be taking up all the room. None were particularly helpful. They all said that "other" category is PDFs, caches, etc.
That didn't seem right to me, and further searching turned up an app called "DaisyDisk."
I figured for $10 it's worth a try. I downloaded it and it was able to free up almost all that "cruft".
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wrote on 20 Dec 2020, 17:07 last edited by Mik
800GB is a lot of cruft. Most of it Users? How so?
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wrote on 20 Dec 2020, 17:17 last edited by
@mik I think a lot of it was "Time Machine snapshots."
Time Machine creates files as images of the current state of the drive and then, I guess writes the image to the external drive.
Googling around I found that to be a common culprit. It can be done manually via terminal, but it's a PIA to do.
I hadn't noted any performance hits or anything, just losing drive space. Since I had a couple of good backups, I thought I'd give it a try.
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@mik I think a lot of it was "Time Machine snapshots."
Time Machine creates files as images of the current state of the drive and then, I guess writes the image to the external drive.
Googling around I found that to be a common culprit. It can be done manually via terminal, but it's a PIA to do.
I hadn't noted any performance hits or anything, just losing drive space. Since I had a couple of good backups, I thought I'd give it a try.
wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 02:31 last edited by -
wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 12:39 last edited by
I ran it again, just out of curiosity:
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wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 13:53 last edited by
That's interesting. When I run CCleaner I normally get just over 5GB cleaned. I think I had 80 one time.
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That's interesting. When I run CCleaner I normally get just over 5GB cleaned. I think I had 80 one time.
wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 14:07 last edited by@mik said in Cruft Eliminator:
That's interesting. When I run CCleaner I normally get just over 5GB cleaned. I think I had 80 one time.
Go to Apple Menu-> About This Mac -> Storage and see how big the "other" category is. In my case it was about 800 gigs. Now down to about 275. I thought it was all that German p*rn, but then I realized I keep that on an external drive....
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I have an external 2 TB SSD that I boot my Mac from. Between photos, docs, etc, I have about 650 gigs of stuff.
Over the last few months, I've noticed my free space going down. It got to the point that I had "only" 650 gigs free - so something was eating up about half a terabyte. Doing a "about this mac" storage revealed that about 800 gig was "other", not music, photos, videos, etc.
I searched all the usual sites about what could be taking up all the room. None were particularly helpful. They all said that "other" category is PDFs, caches, etc.
That didn't seem right to me, and further searching turned up an app called "DaisyDisk."
I figured for $10 it's worth a try. I downloaded it and it was able to free up almost all that "cruft".
wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 14:24 last edited by@george-k said in Cruft Eliminator:
storage revealed that about 800 gig was "other"
In that dialog, you can press on "Manage" and see the individual files that are in that category, sorted by size.
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@george-k said in Cruft Eliminator:
storage revealed that about 800 gig was "other"
In that dialog, you can press on "Manage" and see the individual files that are in that category, sorted by size.
wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 14:42 last edited by@klaus said in Cruft Eliminator:
@george-k said in Cruft Eliminator:
storage revealed that about 800 gig was "other"
In that dialog, you can press on "Manage" and see the individual files that are in that category, sorted by size.
Yeah, I've done that. Remarkably unhelpful.
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wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 14:43 last edited by
Note the "other" is greyed out at the bottom.
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wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 15:14 last edited by
Interesting. When I first looked at it (1TB external hard drive SATA), is showed 113 MB used by other. After going back like one minute later, it was down to 56 MB used by other.
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wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 15:54 last edited by
Presumably, it doesn't matter what size is given for "Other", since it's stuff that will be removed by the OS if space becomes scarce.
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Presumably, it doesn't matter what size is given for "Other", since it's stuff that will be removed by the OS if space becomes scarce.
wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 15:57 last edited by@klaus said in Cruft Eliminator:
Presumably, it doesn't matter what size is given for "Other", since it's stuff that will be removed by the OS if space becomes scarce.
Yes, that's what DaisyDIsk assured me. Still, I was surprised to see so much crap on the drive, and that it accumulated so quickly (over a month or so).
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wrote on 21 Dec 2020, 16:19 last edited by
First they came for the cruft.
But I was not cruft, so I said nothing....
