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ever since I upgraded my Mac to El Capitan ( now I'm with Catalina ) - my hard drive is acting strange.

After a reboot I start with having almost 14GB of free space, and somehow a long the way it's getting lowered as the time goes by .... you can literally see it with watch du -h over time ...

Now I have 391Mi free space, and after a reboot it goes by to 13/14GB ... and then it goes again.

The behavior sometimes feels like that applications I open - take memory/disk, and when i close them - i'm not getting the memory back ...

Activity monitor - doesn't do much for me ...

I'm not sure why this is happening, and I wanted to request suggestions / tools - on how to start debugging it ....

Edit

I know this post was considered "already answered" but this is no a matter of "where my disk space go?" to clean it up. It's something else, example:

08:55:13 $ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s5   234Gi   10Gi  2.2Gi    82%  484313 2448641047    0%   /

11:47:30 $ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s5   234Gi   10Gi  1.1Gi    91%  484313 2448641047    0%   /


12:57:27 $ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s5   234Gi   10Gi  115Mi    99%  484313 2448641047    0%   /


12:57:28 $ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity iused      ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk1s5   234Gi   10Gi   84Mi   100%  484313 2448641047    0%   /
                              ^^^
                             CRAZY

Where, in 3 hours 1G go ?! .... the Mac was idle ... I wasn't near it .. After working (using Outlook/iTerm etc .. ) - after 1 hour - 100MB !? something crazy is going on ..

Ricky Levi
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  • 14GB is critically low free space. Minimum 10% free on a large drive, considerably more on a small drive. – Tetsujin Sep 05 '20 at 07:51
  • yeah, but what can I do .. the disk is small ... – Ricky Levi Sep 06 '20 at 10:00
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    Saw this post in reopen queue. Re you edit, there are two ways I know which can find disk space usage: 1 Activity monitor > disk tab. something that writes 10 GB so fast would definitely show up if you sort the table. 2 Use the answers in the question @Tetsujin linked and see where the files are. Let me know by @ pinging me after adding the results to the post. It's also worth testing if this happens in the safe mode too. https://support.apple.com/HT201262 – anki Sep 06 '20 at 10:28
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    Time Machine local backups or bird could easily account for 14GB - amongst the reasons your drive is critically over-full. – Tetsujin Sep 06 '20 at 11:16
  • @anki Google Chrome: 9GB (?!) ... – Ricky Levi Sep 07 '20 at 08:27
  • I assume this info is from Activity Monitor, disk tab. So is Chrome downloading something ? Or is any of its extensions corrupt? – anki Sep 07 '20 at 09:00
  • no, usual ... i'm working with it all the time. found another one: kernel_task 72GB - what's that about ? I can't close it – Ricky Levi Sep 08 '20 at 06:00
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    What are you actually trying to do now?? You can't 'close' kernel-task, it's the top level process which is in charge of every other process on your Mac. You need to clear some space on your drive. That is the only 'fix'. [Or get a bigger drive] – Tetsujin Sep 08 '20 at 08:25
  • @Tetsujin I know that, but it's impossible to always clear and something in the Mac is "eat"ing the space all the time ... how in 3 or 4 hours I'm left with 84M ? after reboot I start from scratch - until the space run out - I reboot again, but it's crazy working like that – Ricky Levi Sep 09 '20 at 13:43
  • I'm not sure how many different ways I can say this… You must leave the drive room to breathe. You're choking it. It will come back eventually to bite hard, because something will fail, permanently. Make some space on the drive. There is no other solution. 14GB free space, as you can see, is nowhere near enough. On a tiny drive like that, you should be thinking more like 30 to 50GB free space. Then it will stop complaining at you & will last longer. When it's nearly full you are constantly overwriting the same few areas of the drive, which will eventually lead to early failure. – Tetsujin Sep 09 '20 at 13:55
  • @Tetsujin thanks for the assistance, but I refuse to believe that in 2020 I need to have 50GB free space for a system to work properly. – Ricky Levi Sep 12 '20 at 06:21
  • i stopped using Chrome ... using Brave now ... disk seems to be the same across all day, the disk doesn't get drained.. no nothing ... :/ – Ricky Levi Oct 01 '20 at 17:31

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