Common wisdom says that you can get rid of cache files and they get rebuilt if you needed them but this one got my curiosity up. Inside the user directory there’s a Caches folder, and the top one OmniDiskSweeper found was 38GB, and it was called. The first thing I discovered was that I had some crazy big cache files hanging around. OmniDiskSweeper also drills down into system files and hidden libraries – nothing can hide from its prying eyes. You can see by size inside folders in column view, but it doesn’t measure the size of the folders themselves so it’s useless in discovery. It seems like the Finder should be able to do this. Seeing the biggest hogs in each folder is cool, but it also shows you the SECOND biggest hog, so I’ll be able to see what other than Photos is taking up so much room. Instead it allows you to drill down into your drive while it’s constantly showing you folders and files with the biggest hogs at the top. Unlike DiskInventoryX and Daisy Disk, this one isn’t graphical. It’s a great app as well, but I remembered the other tool I often use to harvest disk space, the free OmniDiskSweeper from /…. She suggested Daisy Disk as another way to see where my disk space had run off to. Tracey and I happened to chat a bit on Twitter after I showed the image of DiskInventoryX on last week’s show. I know, 400GB for photos is a lot, but where the heck is the other 600GB? In the mean time though, I started thinking about why I only have 26GB left on my 1TB drive. I just received it but haven’t got it doing what I want yet so that’s actually a story for another time. That prompted my purchase of the Samsung T3 1TB external SSD. I mentioned last week that my giant Photos library takes up too much room, and that I only had 26 GB left on the internal 1TB drive on my MacBook Pro. I still should have done a nuke and pave. My hesitation was primarily because my setup is fairly complex for recording, and because I have that giant 400GB Photos library I have to copy back and forth so just the reinstall of my data alone takes forever. In my defense, I did install everything from scratch on this Mac in January of 2014 so just a little over 2 years ago, not the 6-9 years it’s been for Tracey. Remember when I went through all that crazy work with Apple to figure out why iCloud wouldn’t sync my keyboard replacements? My little friend James tried to convince me to do a nuke and pave on my MacBook Pro. I am a hypocrite when I say you should do a nuke and pave when you get into trouble. I tried to encourage her to do a nuke and pave, but because she’s so skilled she was able to avoid that path. She said in her notes that she’d has this account since 2007 and had only switched out one Mac in all that time back in 2010. Finally pull back your data but not all of your settings, instead setting up things one by one, installing apps one by one until you get it all working. For those who haven’t heard the term before, a nuke and pave means to make backup copies of your drive, erase the entire disk inside your machine and then reinstall the operating system. She went through all of this work so that she wouldn’t have to do a nuke and pave. I bring this story up to illustrate the wisdom of a different path. I love that she was able to solve it because she was so technically savvy, like many NosillaCastaways. She did a TON of super geeky diagnostics and in the end (using Terminal fu) she was able to fix her account. For some unknown reason, on boot up, her account would freeze on the desktop picture. In our Google Plus community over at /googleplus, Tracey Baucells posted a problem with her main account on her Mac.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |