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Using Stack Exchange, reading the news, watching a few YouTubes, browsing journals does not cause this. But when I go off into clickbait and less reputable sites my laptop's fan starts running, memory runs out and about 4 GB of disk space becomes unavailable.

In a week or so (after several restarts), the space becomes available again.

I'm not asking which program to download to recover the space, I'm just curious if this stealth disk squatting is a known phenomenon, what might cause it, and how I might discover myself where that space is and clear it out.

  • macOS 10.11 (yes I know, will address this soon)
  • Chrome browser
  • MacBook Air (Mid 2012) (yes I know, will address this soon too!)

update: I did a quick check with CleanMyMac and while it does find some things, it does not find 4 GB. When I remove 0.5 GB this way or delete files, available disk space actually reduces further rather than increases. Strange!

CleanMyMac screenshot

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  • 1
    Can you inspect the total size of ~/library/application support/google/chrome before and after the incident?
    – Joy Jin
    Commented Oct 31, 2020 at 5:30
  • 1
    That is the directory google chrome is suppose to keep local storage, cookies, certain caches, etc.
    – Joy Jin
    Commented Oct 31, 2020 at 6:40
  • 1
    OK. What about ~/Library/Caches/google/chrome? On my laptop it takes up about 1.1 GB.
    – Joy Jin
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 12:10
  • 1
    If that is not the case, then we can try to calculate the size of each folder in the root directory before and after the incident: du -sh /* and then du -sh /<folder that suddenly become larger>/* and etc., until you find the culprit.
    – Joy Jin
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 12:14
  • 1
    It is definitely an overkill but it seems like these files are not being put in conventional places.
    – Joy Jin
    Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 12:15

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