J&P
Sverige / USA
J&P

What’s Eating my Disk…?!

For tools to support finding disk space eaters:

 

Due to Usage Pattern

J&P usage pattern may be a bit extreme: typically have lots of windows open, can be like

  • 30-40 Chrome browser windows (windows list menu doesn’t ft onto even a 38 inch screen but requires scrolling
    • plus tabs in such, sometime a single window alone can have 10-20 tabs (when doing in-depth research)
  • 10-50 Terminal windows, yep – heavy user of terminal commands and typically have quite a few windows always open for commands more frequently reusing (network tools like ifconfig and nmap, for different networks)

Many open windows often means more caching and logs being kept alive and added to, and especially over time can eat up significant amounts of disk space. More in Applications below.

Applications

So, things that can be eating up disk space:

  • Chrome, Google web browser
    • Many open windows creates more cache material being used, which takes up disk space
    • Been able to clear some even GBs from quitting / restarting Chrome
    • FIX:
      1. First, do an effort to closing windows (wrap up research, reason for keeping it)
      2. Then Quit and Restart Chrome
  • Dropbox
  • Email
    • macOS Mail.app – is/apps/macos/email/
      • ~/Library/Mail/
      • ~/Library/Mail/V5 (and maybe older V2, possibly other in future
      • ~/Library/Mail/V9 (not sure when started being used but at least on macOS 12, Monterey)
      • FIX:
        1. Don’t keep too many emails in Mail app (or any email reader)
          • Archive things really important – keepers – onto file system
        2. Clear Trash inside Mail app
        3. Once in a while, DO go to ~/Library/Mail/ and see if it feels reasonable big, possibly look for any older things that possibly ‘have fallen in between chairs’ (that’s how found out had an older V2 folder laying around occupying close to 9 GB!)
  • Terminal
    • Over time, opened terminal windows can create actually quite significant logs, cleared multiple GB from quitting Terminal (which usually is open all the time, with 10-50 terminal windows)
  • Trash
    • … don’t forget to actually empty it once in a while..

Xcode & Development Related

Command Line Tools

 

Xcode

Uninstall Xcode