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I have a 2 year Macbook Pro running OSX Mountain Lion. I have a 2TB RAID set up (Two 1TB drives). Yesterday I had 866GB of space free. I turned it off for the night and came back on the next day and to my surprise I now only have 476GB of free space. How has over 350GB of space been lost in less then a day while it's been off? It's all very odd and any help would be appreciated.

  • Matt

[Edit]: I have already used two applications that graphically show all files on my hard drive. Nothing seems to look out of the ordinary. Last week I has a similar experience, about 400GB of space was used up for several days and it suddenly returned back to normal like the 400GB never existed. I understand fluctuations of space are normal due to caches, page files, backups and so on. But 400GB is a hell of a lot of space!

[Update] - I cloned my RAID Set to a 2TB external drive and the external drive has over 200GB more free space then my RAID set even though they're both bootable and both have identical files and file structures. What the hell is that extra 200GB?!

asked May 22 '12 at 12:46

Mattophobia's gravatar image

Mattophobia ♦♦
7.0k73122206

edited May 26 '12 at 20:11


It's hard to say but I would start with a scan for large files. Double check if anything new is on your system.

answered May 22 '12 at 13:17

Fish's gravatar image

Fish
7.3k109144215

Try this app: Disk Inventory X. It will read your hard drive and show graphically the size of files. Look for any large files or folders using this. It's a generally handy tool for finding what it eating up disk space.

PS; It could be swap space, but it seems a lot.

answered May 22 '12 at 13:17

SkinnyBill's gravatar image

SkinnyBill
656141827

Hi, this happened to me with system restore, shrink it and bam, more hard disk space.

answered May 22 '12 at 22:25

Joel%20Lands's gravatar image

Joel Lands
1

I have the same issue but my 11 macbook pro on Lion. Seems that 50gb has disappeared over the past 2 weeks. Time machine wont back up any more since it needs headroom to the 500gb drive i have as well.

answered Jun 18 '12 at 22:01

playdeep's gravatar image

playdeep
1

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Asked: May 22 '12 at 12:46

Seen: 1,328 times

Last updated: Jun 18 '12 at 22:01