"Other Volumes" takes up nearly my entire Hard Drive

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"Other Volumes" takes up nearly my entire Hard Drive

I have recently run into storage space issues with my 250GB SSD. I used the Disk Utility and found that most of the drive is filled by "Other Volumes."

When I select Macintosh HD - Data I see that the "Used" is taking up most of the drive.

I am unsure what is causing this, or what I can do to fix it? I do have iCloud storage, and because of the lack of space nearly every file seems to be stored on iCloud.

Here is my Mac specs overview if that helps any:

Mac Pro, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 25, 2020 7:50 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,782 points

Aug 25, 2020 4:38 PM in response to ZeroJJC

Macintosh HD holds the OS, about 11 GB.

Macintosh HD - Data is your data and it is one of the other volumes in the container.

The other three are small, Preboot, VM, and Recovery.

So, your data takes up nearly your entire hard drive.

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Answer 2

ZeroJJC Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 26, 2020 6:43 AM in response to Barney-15E

I guess I just don't know where it's coming from as I have cleared out so much there is barely anything on my mac. I have nearly all files on an external.

However, I did find out that Adobe Creative Cloud was taking a bunch of videos and clips of Youtube videos I had been editing on my home computer and storing them in some deep folder on my work Mac... That was nearly 70GB of files which should only be on my home computer.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,782 points

Aug 26, 2020 6:58 AM in response to ZeroJJC

All of your stuff is on the - Data volume. Your main OS drive is not bloated at all.

Use a tool that helps you find the large globs of data like GrandPerspective or OmniDiskSweeper (there are others).

Also note that deleting files from an SSD will not immediately free the space. The less free space you have (and you don't have enough), the longer it takes to do the garbage collection and free up the newly deleted space.

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"Other Volumes" takes up nearly my entire Hard Drive

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