Mac Book Pro Hard Drive Full Issue

tonybassplayer

tonybassplayer

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Long story short my MacBook pro hard drive appears to be full but I am convinced of a couple of things:-

1, it shouldn't be and isn't

2, If it is then I think it's down to installing photos/iphoto wrong

Let me explain a bit more.

With regard to item 2 I replaced my original failing Powerbook a few years ago and I was given the old hard drive with my pictures etc on it and I think I made a bit of a mess of it

Everything else seemed to transfer over fine apart from my photos which at the time were simple iPhone and point and shoot pics all stored in photos or possibly the older version iPhoto

I have attached a picture which shows 178GB of pictures incorporating a 73 and a 45GB in iPhoto and 48GB in Photos

I think I have duplicated things when I transferred them over and maybe only need the "photos" not the "iPhotos"

If so, how can I safely deal with this issue


With regard to item 1 it says I have 258GB stored in iCloud drive. Is this just a duplication of everything on my laptop ? Should this actually be in the cloud and not on my laptop ?

Any help would be much appreciated

Many thanks

Tony
Untitled by Tony Keogh, on Flickr
 
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The “Cloud Drive” item is just showing what is in the Cloud like the way DropBox works. Sorry, I don’t have any other help to offer. You do have 2 iPhoto libraries but one can have lots of them and choose which to open so they may not be duplicates.
 
I'm a little confused as to what I am looking at. I'm perplexed that your Application folder has zero KB . Plus your Documents folder shows your Picture , Movie, Music folder etc. Click on the desktop and from the File menu open a new finder window. You should then get a list of locations etc on your computer. Right clock on the HD icon and select Get Info. This should then show you how much free space that is available. Aditionaly you can highlight each of the listed entries in the left hand column and use the Get Info option to see what size each folder contains

You seem to have multiple iPhoto libraries . This may be the problem, or what the Mac thinks is a problem . You might want to investigate and see if they are in fact duplicates.
 
Many thanks for the feedback so far

It really is much appreciated and I will try explain as best I can where I am up to.

The picture above is a screenshot from yesterday after going in to the top left hand apple icon then "about this mac" and then "storage" and then "manage"

The picture below is from five mins ago after earlier deleting the 45GB iPhoto library as I am pretty certain that is a duplicate of the pictures in Photos (I know I made a bit of a hash of it when I got this laptop and moved things over)

Chappers - I don't seem to be able to find the HD icon doing it that way - Not sure I am doing it right

Please feel free to ask for any more info or pictures as I am more than happy to keep supplying anything that might help.

Untitled by Tony Keogh, on Flickr
 
Whether hard drives etc show up depends on the settings in the file manager ?view menu.
 
Managed to get this info to show

Still puzzling me why there appears to be nearly 250GB in iCloud drive

Untitled by Tony Keogh, on Flickr
 
OK That looks better as you now have some items in your application folder ( that did worry me. Try this
Click on the desktop: This will now switch the menu bar ( at the top left ) to Finder.
Now from the File menu select "New Finder Window You'll get a new window open with a list of locations on the left hand side. Choose "All my Files"
Now go to the View tab on the top menu and select "As List" And also "By Size" This will list all your files by size groups .
Finally again in the View tab look for " Show view options" . You'll see a small window open. Check that the "size" option is ticked. If not tick it. You should now see a list of all your files showing the size of each one .
You can now look and see what is bloating your storage and delete if necessary. Often its a very overstuffed download folder with all those things you are saving just in case. ( and never use) If you have a spare hard drive you can archive the this off on to that if you want to
From what I've seen I'd also have a good look at Documents . That seems to be a very large folder
Hope this helps
 
Hi John

Huge thanks for persevering with me

I can't seem to get to choose "All My Files" so unable to move to the next step

This is a picture from earlier and I can't seem to get to a more "deep down".

Any thoughts ?

Untitled by Tony Keogh, on Flickr
 
Worry not . It's probably my fault you can't get any further. Its one of those things. You set your Mac up years ago and everything moves when you update and the set up you did 5+ years ago gets forgotten
You simply have to set up the side bar to show things. A fact that I had totally forgotten. However here is a simple guide How to do it. Its a simple operation of ticking boxes in the Finder Preferences
One stupid thought. You have emptied the TRASH! Don't laugh I know of someone who had a similar problem years ago. Emptied the trash ( though it was on a PC) and he got 3/4 of his hard drive back.

https://www.macworld.com/article/31...e-all-my-files-icon-in-the-macos-sidebar.html

Keep the faith as they say
 
“All My Files” has gone in High Sierra. If you are on High Sierra you can replicate it with a new Smart Folder that selects all the file types you want to see.
 
Chappers said:
Worry not . It's probably my fault you can't get any further. Its one of those things. You set your Mac up years ago and everything moves when you update and the set up you did 5+ years ago gets forgotten
You simply have to set up the side bar to show things. A fact that I had totally forgotten. However here is a simple guide How to do it. Its a simple operation of ticking boxes in the Finder Preferences
One stupid thought. You have emptied the TRASH! Don't laugh I know of someone who had a similar problem years ago. Emptied the trash ( though it was on a PC) and he got 3/4 of his hard drive back.

https://www.macworld.com/article/31...e-all-my-files-icon-in-the-macos-sidebar.html

Keep the faith as they say
Click to expand...

Managed to do that and clicked to show a few more boxes but unable to see "all my files" still but I have just seen the response from sphexx and I only updated to High Sierra at the weekend so that would explain that.

PS - Yes, I am emptying the trash on a very regular basis lol
 
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sphexx said:
“All My Files” has gone in High Sierra. If you are on High Sierra you can replicate it with a new Smart Folder that selects all the file types you want to see.
Click to expand...

Many thanks that explains why I can't see "All My Files" - Updated to High Sierra at the weekend lol
 
It seems I was wrong about iCloud Drive and by default it mirrors everything to your Mac. I only keep a few files in iCloud so it wasn’t obvious. Presumably you are paying a subscription for iCloud because the free option is quite small. Your iCloud Drive is huge but noe of the screenshots above show what’s in it it. It would be worth checking and also looking at the online iCloud Drive to see if they agree. You obviously need to reduce your storage on the internal drive since 34gb is very little. Have you got everything backed up locally to external hard drives or are you relying on iCloud which I think is not what it is intended to do.
I find iCloud rather confusing. I think it is only making stuff available on all your devices and for collaboration not for backup.
https://www.apple.com/icloud/icloud-drive/
 
Yes, the iCloud thing has been confusing me too as I when I look on my phone and iPad there is only about 15GB in use and the other 185GB is free space. I upgraded to the 200GB package a year or two ago when my old phone couldn’t handle the pictures I was taking.

Are you thinking that the iCloud folder on my laptop is effectively replicating everything on my hard drive and storing it locally (effectively taking up double the amount of space) ? It certainly looks like that to me. I might be tempted to temporary ditch iCloud for a day or so as I’m not sure it’s helping my situation.

I have found my old Lacie external hard drive and going to get a new lead (FireWire to thunderbolt) later this week and then I might try removing the old iPhoto pictures to it (73GB) so that should help too.

Once again thanks for the help.
 
Yes, its probably something like that and seemed huge at the time

I'm going to bite the bullet and order a decent sized one and get on with doing the job right

May even give up paying for the Apple storage as I'm not really sure I will need it then
 
If you are mainly using iCloud to deal with photos off your phone (I think you said that earlier) then you could look at Google Photos which is free and unlimited for the size of photo files from phone cameras and actually syncs better than iCloud photos. Google photos can run alongside iCloud photos.
 
tonybassplayer said:
Yes, its probably something like that and seemed huge at the time

I'm going to bite the bullet and order a decent sized one and get on with doing the job right

May even give up paying for the Apple storage as I'm not really sure I will need it then
Click to expand...

Whether you need it or not will depend on your attitude to risk really. You can definitely do a backup to an external drive but there are a number of other threads on here about backups, recommendations on where too, number of copies etc.

if you have it on just an external drive, how often will you backup? where will you keep it? in the same location as the MBP? that's a risk as both copies are in the same location. Somewhere else? If you keep that backup and in the cloud, that gives you extra protection, but obviously more cost. etc. etc. as you can imagine, the thought process can go on and on.

At the end of the day, you just need to be aware of the risks in any choice and happy with the amount of risk you are then willing to take.
 
tonybassplayer said:
Yes, its probably something like that and seemed huge at the time
Click to expand...
What seemed huge to me at the time was the 40MB (MB!) hard drive that I bought for my Atari computer that cost several hundred pounds, hard to understand now as it does not seem very long ago.
 
rackhs said:
Whether you need it or not will depend on your attitude to risk really. You can definitely do a backup to an external drive but there are a number of other threads on here about backups, recommendations on where too, number of copies etc.

if you have it on just an external drive, how often will you backup? where will you keep it? in the same location as the MBP? that's a risk as both copies are in the same location. Somewhere else? If you keep that backup and in the cloud, that gives you extra protection, but obviously more cost. etc. etc. as you can imagine, the thought process can go on and on.

At the end of the day, you just need to be aware of the risks in any choice and happy with the amount of risk you are then willing to take.
Click to expand...
But I don’t think iCloud Drive is a backup* since it is a sync system, so if stuff is deleted off your hard drive it will be deleted from the cloud too. In that respect Google Photos is better as a backup.

* though I confess to not entirely understanding how iCloud Drive works, especially since how it works changes between OS X versions.
 
tonybassplayer said:
Are you thinking that the iCloud folder on my laptop is effectively replicating everything on my hard drive and storing it locally (effectively taking up double the amount of space) ?
Click to expand...

I'm sure I have something like this going on also. I suspect I have some of my photos stored in triplicate somehow - once in Apple Photos, once in Lightroom, and once in an iCloud back of Lightroom photos.
I'll probably make sure everything is in Apple Photos and then delete and re-install Lightroom and it's libraries once the Hard Drive and iCloud account get close to full
 
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These Cloudy things can get very confusing I think. You end up with photos all over the place in various apps and devices and it’s not easy to check what is where :(
 
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