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My Mac claims to be running out of storage, and when I look at my storage breakdown, this is what I see:

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However, when I look through the files, this is what I see:

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Documents appears to only be about 60 GB, and almost all of that is due to Parallels VMs (I have a Windows 10 VM and an Ubuntu VM so I'm not surprised about the size of that folder).

So it looks like my Mac doesn't realize just how much storage it has... is there a way to fix this?

UPDATE:

Here is what the disk utility shows:

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And here is what running diskutil list gives me:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         250.8 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +250.8 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            240.1 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 42.1 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                510.4 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB     disk1s4

UPDATE 2:

Here is what Disk Inventory X says:

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    Have a look at the drive with Disk Inventory X as it will help you figure out what's taking up all the space. Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 5:07
  • @user3439894 updated the description!
    – rcplusplus
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 5:40

1 Answer 1

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So it turned out that there was hidden folder that was causing my woes... it was 58 GB in size! Disk Inventory X helped me catch it.

The Mac storage analyzer was counting that stuff as Documents, which was causing the weird discrepancies. That hidden folder was something that could easily be deleted since it just contained junk.

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  • So where was the hidden folder and was it something you create at some point in time or was it created by the OS? Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 11:05
  • @user3439894 There's this program I use called mutagen that syncs a remote server folder to a local folder so I can develop locally. Turns out I had accidentally created a huge log file in that folder on the server, which made the computer try to sync it locally... This caused the folder ~/.mutagen on my local machine to blow up in size and eat up my hard disk.
    – rcplusplus
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 19:37
  • So it was unrelated to the OS and solely because I'm an idiot lol
    – rcplusplus
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 19:38
  • Although fun fact, the log file on the server was actually 117 GB in size!! I think mutagen stopped syncing after 58 GB cuz it just didn't have space to resume haha
    – rcplusplus
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 19:39

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