Space Occupied By Other Files And Folders On Hard Drive

Question

I have been using VirtualBox to create a virtual machine to run Windows 8 on and after deleting the virtual drives and virtualbox due to having issues with Windows 8, I am missing a lot of memory from my hard drive. I currently also have 72GB of backups on my Hard Drive that I did not create, any ideas on how to get rid of them?

When I view my Hard Drive contents via Disk Inventory X it comes up that I have nearly 99GB of space occupied by other files that not even Disk Inventory X can identify!

Area of other files:

Answer 1

Have you attempted to empty the trash after removing the VM? Alternately, I believe that VirtualBox keeps its data at "~/VirtualBox VMs". Removing that folder may help you to reclaim drive space.

Here's more info on TimeMachine's local snapshots. If you'd like to disable that feature, you can use these commands to perform that action:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

Here's how you can re-enable local snapshots:

sudo tmutil enablelocal

Here's how to take a snapshot:

tmutil snapshot

Answer 2

Maybe a little bit different issue, but I also had a huge chunk of Space Occupied By Other Files And Folders On Hard Drive on my external disk. I found the culprit by using OmniDiskSweeper with root priveleges, as explained here.

That means: sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

In this case it was files in the trash bin, which for some reason were not deleted when emptying it. The following command then solved my problem (source):

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/ExternalHD/.Trashes