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Movies that I cannot find are taking up 200 GB on my Mac. I tried looking for these movies but I cannot find them. I believe that this is being cause by a video editing software I use called "VideoBlend". I think that it creates backups of the videos onto my mac, but I cannot find any them. Not sure what I should do.

Note: I've searched countless of questions on this site and I was unable to find a solution.

Update: I also used to manually insert movies into my devices on Itunes. Could there be backup files of these movies?

Update 2: I completely missed out on the fact that my mac has storage space of only 128GB'S. So could this just be an error. If so, is there a way for me to fix it?

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  • use "defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles" to show all files including hidden one. – Ruskes May 27 '15 at 6:51
  • I've already tried that and still can't find these files. Odd how difficult it is to find something that is taking up so much space. – Name May 27 '15 at 7:02
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    It could be false reporting. I use OmniDiskSweeper. omnigroup.com/more – Ruskes May 27 '15 at 7:09
  • Could be just cached files that will clean-up on a reboot... – CousinCocaine May 27 '15 at 9:16
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    What tells you that you have that much in movies? – lhf May 27 '15 at 12:25
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The How can I figure out what's slowly eating my HD space? provides a general approach to answering your question.

Graph and Find

You can use a tool like GrandPerspective to help highlight large files on your Mac:

enter image description here

Disk Inventory X is an alternative disk space visualizer:

enter image description here

Ask VideoBlend's Developers

Consider contacting the makers of VideoBlend, via videoblendteam@gmail.com, and asking them directly. This may help prompt the developers to improve their caching approach in the future.

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    I've already tried program like these. They don't show me any kind of movies that I cannot find on my computer. And I contacted VideoBlend hopefully they respond soon. Thank you for your help. – Name May 27 '15 at 7:03
  • To my best knowledge, GrandPerspective was based on Disk Inventory X. Were Disk Inventory X stopped development, GrandPerspective took over. – CousinCocaine May 27 '15 at 9:14
  • @Graham, Do you have something like this for Windows? – Pacerier May 27 '15 at 12:27
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    @Pacerier WinDirStat – M. Mimpen May 27 '15 at 12:34
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To find all files larger than 50MB in any directory, use Terminal.app and the find utility:

find . -type f -size +50M -ls | awk '{for (i=1;i<7;++i) $i=""; print $0}' | sort -n

Adjust +50M to whatever size limit you find suitable. The list will be sorted with largest file last. Be warned that this might take some time if you start from root. You might add -x argument to find to limit to just one device (if more disks are mounted).

To find all files in root-device:

cd /
find . -type f -size +50M -x -ls | awk '{for (i=1;i<7;++i) $i=""; print $0}' | sort -n
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  • I typed these into terminal and the commands do not work. Are they all one line? I just copied and pasted the code in the box. Thank you for your help. – Name May 27 '15 at 18:10
  • The dollar sign at the beginning of each line the command prompt, you shouldn't type it. – Martin Argerami May 27 '15 at 19:18
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As a sysadmin this is a very common task. Here's the command-line method I found out a long time ago and it's part of my routine of detecting and tracking down large sets of files nearly every day.

du -d 1 | sort -n

The nice thing about this command is that the largest directories/files are sorted to the bottom. So if there is a long list that goes off the page, it doesn't matter because the large ones that matter are directly above where you are typing on the command line, easily readable with barely any eye movement.

Then you just cd into the largest few directories and repeat the same command again until you have found your files. (Hidden directories are automatically included by default.)

Note: you'l get a couple of permission denied errors on Mac OS X from the flash player plugin folder, for example.

Refinements: You may add prefixes like m to the command to print in megabytes, for example, e.g., du -md 1 | sort -n. (However, you cannot use the -h option (human readable) because it will destroy the sortability of the output if different units of size are included in the output.)

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  • How many gigabytes would a number like this be "16714560" ? – Name May 27 '15 at 18:13
  • @Name Each integer represents one 512 byte block, so that means there's about 2 GB in your trash. That's a lot if your Trash is supposedly empty. However, the 200 GB would then be somewhere else. (Unless you did the -m option, in which case you have 4112400 MB in your trash, which would be 4 TB!) – Joseph Myers May 27 '15 at 18:20
  • Divide by 2097152 to convert the standard output to GB, and you get 8 GB from 16714560 (512 byte) blocks. Or you can just do the option du -gd 1 | sort -n in order to automatically show your output in GB. I prefer to do du -md 1 | sort -n in order to show everything in MB and get more granularity. – Joseph Myers May 27 '15 at 18:22
  • The most I have is in my Library which only has 22 gb's. I am so confused I don't know why I can't find these 200 gb's. – Name May 27 '15 at 18:25
  • How do you know for sure that there are 200 GB of movies? Or do you know that there are 200 GB of space that is unaccounted for? You can try doing the command in the root directory (cd / before running the command). – Joseph Myers May 27 '15 at 18:27
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I had this issue recently and it was that where I store my movies I thought was the only copy (Documents/Movies) but when you import them to iTunes iTunes copies them into their own iTunes directory rather than referencing their original location.

So have a look in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ and you might find a folder that has all your 200gb of movies in. Thats if you brought them into iTunes, otherwise I'm stumped!

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  • I tried searching for this folder, but it did not work. Also can you make the folder find movies instead of music. Thanks for your help. – Name May 27 '15 at 18:11
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Perhaps this is too simple, but this is how I would approach it:

  1. Go to the relevant drive, and check the size of all contained folders.
  2. Enter each folder that is inside and big enough to hide something relevant, now check the contents of this folder and the size of its subfolders
  3. Repeat step 2

It should not take more than 2 minutes to find the guilty folder (perhaps excluding the time it takes to check the size of each folder).

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