I was reading TidBITS talk earlier today on my Mac Studio and a warning popped up, mail has to quit since there is no more space on the hard drive. Hilarious! I have 2TB, I use maybe 500GB. No way! Wait why do I only have 1GB free???
I had 1.5TB of system data, whaaaaat where did it come from oh no.
After about 1-2 hours of stress and reading and poking, it was because I had to use Chrome to download some data (Reddit data from Arctic Shift), and it sends a little data, sends a little data… so Chrome makes a new little ~15kb file every 5 seconds or so in its cache folder. There were maybe 25,000 little files (if you do the math it doesn’t add up though).
I managed to get it all back under control to try again (threw the files in the trash, emptied, that didn’t work mild panic, restart cleared it all out). I found a terminal command to start Chrome with a cache limit, which I set to 1GB (which is actually too large).
So, the process is working, but the cache files are only about 8,300 files for about 410MB at the moment, however, my drive space is down to 1.14TB when it should be around 1.5TB, and the System Data is 500GB – so, clearly it’s not just the Chrome cache in the Chrome cache folder (Library/Caches/Google/Chrome/Default/Cache), some other thing is growing massively along with it. (Keeping track of all the little files?) The data file is going on to an external drive.
What is going on, and how do I control it so it doesn’t take up all the space on my hard drive? (I still have to get the comments part of the Reddit data, I could start Chrome with like 10MB of cache space….) (I would rather not use Chrome but Arctic Shift uses some download thing I think that isn’t in Safari or Firefox, and clearly whatever it is is causing some problems in some way.)
