How to find out what eats up my hard drive space on OS X?

Question

First of all, I do use Clean My Mac 2, but even so, something is still eating up my hard drive space. For example yesterday I had 27 GB free space, today I only have 22 GB. I haven't downloaded or installed anything since yesterday, so I don't really understand this. I didn't even open any application that possibly could generate this much cache. I only surfed the web since yesterday in Safari, and that's it. Well, I did update iTunes and iMovie today (via the mac app store) but I checked the ~/Library/Application Support/App Store directory, and there were no temporary files left over.

How can I quickly find out what has happened on my hard drive since yesterday? I tried searching for files larger than 1 GB and created in the past 2 days in spotlight, but no success.

This is not caused by some log or cache files, since those are generated slowly over time (and Clean My Mac 2 also takes care of those). But as I said, 5 GB of my free space was suddenly gone today. I don't really get it... any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use the find command with the -ctime and the -size flags.

For example, to search in the current dir (.) for all the files created since yesterday (-ctime -1) and larger than 1M (-size +1M):

$ find . -type f -ctime -1 -size +1M

One alternative to this method is to use du -hs to find out the size of the files/dirs in a given dir:

$ du -hs path_to_dir/*

This will give you insight on the larger dirs in your file system.

By the way, have you checked your trash can?

Answer 2

If you perform backups of your iPhone or iPad regularly, OSX keeps these handy and doesn't overwrite them so they start to clog things up once you're into "space management mode".

If you are an iDevice user, check:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup