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My home directory is magically growing, somewhere between a few bytes to a witnessed high of 50 KB every other second (possibly more when I'm not looking). I'm staring at this Get Info window, doing nothing else with my Mac, and seeing the number go up:

Get Info for my home dir

I'm on a MacBookAir6,2 (mid-2013) running Catalina (10.15.7) and this has happened before on a previous version of OS X. I then solved it by completely wiping the HD, installing OS X that came with the machine (pretty old), upgrading the OS in 2 steps because the upgrade mechanism changed and finally restoring from Time Machine, but that was just a few months ago. I don't feel like doing that every couple of months.

I've analysed some by doing du -sh * and du -sh .* in the Terminal (latter to get the hidden files/folders) but that only accounts for 18 of the 73 GB. So what is occupying the other 55 GB?

The du command does skip these directories with the error Operation not permitted, even when I do sudo du -sh *. Could it be some process that's accessing these ~/Library/[..] paths?

These are giving me the Operation not permitted:

du: Library/Application Support/MobileSync: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Application Support/CallHistoryTransactions: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Application Support/FileProvider: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Application Support/CallHistoryDB: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Autosave Information: Operation not permitted
du: Library/IdentityServices: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Messages: Operation not permitted
du: Library/HomeKit: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Sharing: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Mail: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Safari: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Suggestions: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Containers/com.apple.archiveutility: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Containers/com.apple.CloudDocs.MobileDocumentsFileProvider: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Containers/com.apple.mail: Operation not permitted
du: Library/PersonalizationPortrait: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Cookies: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Caches/CloudKit: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari: Operation not permitted
du: Library/Caches/com.apple.ap.adprivacyd: Operation not permitted
asontu
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  • I find OmniDisksweeper to be a reliable and easy to use tool to figure out what eats up disk space. It's free and compatible with pretty much any version of macOS: https://www.omnigroup.com/more – Kevin Grabher Oct 11 '21 at 17:17
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    The most likely thing in one of those "Operation not permitted" folders. Have you granted Terminal full disk access in the Security & Privacy preferences (see here)? Also, I recommend sudo du -hd1 instead of sudo du -hs * (not sure if sudo is needed, but in this case it doesn't hurt). – Gordon Davisson Oct 11 '21 at 17:24
  • After giving full disk access to the terminal as explained above by Gordon, you can use this command : sudo du -sxg ~/* 2>&1 | grep -v permitted | sort -nr | head -n 20 and sudo du -sxg ~/.* 2>&1 | grep -v permitted | sort -nr | head -n 20 –  Oct 11 '21 at 17:39
  • @GordonDavisson's link did it, I had OmniDiskSweeper and GrandPerspective (similar app) installed but they couldn't figure it out either until I gave them the full disk access. I turned out to be files under Library/Application Support/MobileSync/backup which is where wireless backups of iOS devices are stored. Turned those off and deleted old backups and got my drive's space back. – asontu Oct 11 '21 at 20:12

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