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On a headless Mac Mini running Mojave, my 1tb Macintosh HD is nearly full at 861gb used (after deleting some stuff - it was critical before). However the sizes of the folders within it after forcing finder to calculate their individual sizes only add up to about 100gb. The grey 'system' bar on the about my mac storage tab is over 700gb.

sudo du -sh * run in /Volumes/Macintosh HD throws too many permission denied errors to help me find the culprit.

On a PC I'd just run TreeSize and that would show me where the offending file or files were. Does anyone know of a method or tool (that doesn't cost the world, there isn't much budget for this) that'll let me track down what's eating up all the HD space?

dartacus
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    Try sudo du -sh / ie don't use *. However this question is a duplicate – mmmmmm Jun 27 '19 at 10:26
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    No - DaisyDisk is reading disk snapshots, system caches, local time machine backups, and doing the math to catalog all the usage that's not obvious. It's not a simple wrapper on a simple command. It still might not be worth the value in your eyes - but there are going to be about 5 pre-existing questions that cover all the aspects of how this happens. – bmike Jun 27 '19 at 10:29
  • Being a Brit, I did a search for 'disc usage' before asking this. 'disk usage' gets different results. Only shifted spelling into 'disk' mode when I started typing. – dartacus Jun 27 '19 at 10:37
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    Does thinning local shapshots move the needle a little? https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/340905/how-to-delete-all-local-timemachine-snapshots/340922#340922 You don't need to prune them all, but it's where I'd start. Also - making sure there are no errors Disk Utility can fix by restarting into recovery and running a check might be good. Hard to know if this is accounting error or that the filesystem does things you didn't anticipate / expect in how spotlight catalogs and hides some files from you. – bmike Jun 27 '19 at 10:44
  • @bmike Don't use time machine on this mac, as it's just a file server - all important data is on an external RAID volume, so no local snapshots. Have already run disk utility, and it didn't turn anything up, disk is healthy. Have paid for a DaisyDisk license though, so will try that. – dartacus Jun 27 '19 at 10:48
  • Where were the files hiding? – bmike Jun 27 '19 at 18:50
  • @bmike In /Volumes - an rsync job designed to copy files from the external RAID to a new NAS (I've had enough of the mac as a file server, this is just the latest in a long line of PITAs) was copying them to the HD because the mac had somehow disassociated /Volumes/folder_on_new_nas from it's actual location. Obvious in hindsight, annoyingly.Thanks for your help. – dartacus Jun 28 '19 at 07:39

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