Interrogating my mac's hard drive

[Andy B]

I have a six month old mac running Mavericks. I bought it with the 1TB hard drive because on previous PC's I'd never amassed anything like enough data to need this amount of space. On my old Windows PC I used to hover around the 300 to 350 GB mark.

Imagine my surprise today when I spotted that I have already used 700MB on the new machine! Adding more memory is not an issue, but I am at a loss to explain what is taking up so my space. Is it just the Apple operating system, could it be something to do with the fact that I am running Parallels on it? (although I only allocated 50Mb to this function).

I used to have a nice little bit of firmware for my Windows PC that would show me a breakdown of what was taking up space on the hard drive. I'm not proficient enough yet on the mac to dig around the annals trying to find this sort of information.

Anyone got any useful advice on how to work out what's taking up so much space?

 

[donkeh]

Hi,

I've used "OmniDiskSweeper" before now.

If you are comfortable in Terminal there are other ways to look without installin apps.

Leon

 

[stolzy]

OmniDiskSweeper certainly works.

I prefer 'WhatSize'

 

[shay]

Do you have a laptop? If so, and you have enabled time machine and you aren't connected to your time machine backup hard drive, Time Machine will perform local backups which use up space on your hard drive. This apple support doc explains this in detail:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

As said above, omnidisk sweeper will list every app and the space it takes up on your hard drive. Try it and you should see what the issue is.

 

[Andy B]

Great advice guys - thanks. I've run OmniDiskSweeper and spotted that I've got about 300Gb of stuff that is repeated! That makes a big difference!