Mac tech question.
Wife has a Mac book pro. Maybe 4 years old. Internal had is just over 300 gb.
She has about 2 gb of free space on the drive. Not good. I ask her to bring it home from work so I can clear it out a bit, but I can’t figure out where the massive files are!
She’s got a solid 30gb in photos folder. But everything else I checked comes to maybe 100 gigs total. I checked downloads, documents, movies… Tbere are apparently some giant files I just can’t find.
Any suggestions?
I’m going to assume you aren’t familiar with OS X. Apologies for the “no duh” directions if you are.
Open a Finder window (click on Desktop anywhere and command-N). Put it in list view (command-2).
Click on “Macintosh HD” or whatever the computer icon at the top of the sidebar is called on her computer.
Open View Options (command-J). Check the “Size” and “Calculate all sizes” boxes.
Just keep going from there.
I did that manually, folder by folder. But let me try that approach, thanks.
Download Grand Perspective and have it do a scan of the drive. It will show you visually where the large files are hiding.
Ah! Thanks!
Ha! Mystery solved!
200 gigs of “recovered mail” from aol.
I did mention it’s my wife’s machine, right? Yeah. She’s still using aol mail. Sigh.
Holy shit, how the hell can you have 200 gigs of email?!
Fixed at her work. They used a program called disc inventory x. And there were 1 million copies of 1 email from 2011.
How? No clue. How she didn’t notice it? Again, no clue.
Pure luck I used her laptop yesterday and noticed the hard drive had 2 gigs of free space. Now it has 208 gigs of free space. Go figure.