Hard drive full but file and folder sizes sizes don't add up

[macmesser]

Running high Sierra on a Mac Pro 5,1. I have a 1TB SSD boot drive showing 998 GB of space used and I'm getting disk full messages. The used disk space (about 907GB) is almost all in my own user folder but it doesn't add up. Adding up subfolder sizes in finder shows about 9GB. The Mac Pro is used only for email, web browsing and occasional photoshop image editing (but not storage) of files under 10MB. I know I did not create nearly 1TB worth of data since the drive was installed to replace a 500GB SSD (for the same reason) by cloning the 500GB to the 1TB SSD. What could be causing this massive discrepancy between finder information on available disk space and folder sizes? More importantly, how do I find the invisible thing that is apparently eating disk capacity? Could the drive, which tests ok, be degrading?

 

[joevt]

In the Finder:
For the disk you are looking at, select it, press Command-I to Get Info..., and note the Capacity, and Used amounts for the disk.
Open the root folder of the disk.
Type Command-Shift-Period to see invisible items.
In the View Options (Command-J), enable "Calculate all sizes".
Click the Size column in the Finder window to sort by file size in descending order (maybe click it twice).

 

[macmesser]

In the Finder:
For the disk you are looking at, select it, press Command-I to Get Info..., and note the Capacity, and Used amounts for the disk.
Open the root folder of the disk.
Type Command-Shift-Period to see invisible items.
In the View Options (Command-J), enable "Calculate all sizes".
Click the Size column in the Finder window to sort by file size in descending order (maybe click it twice).

Thanks! The offender was an incompatible drive utility which I hadn't used since a bug appeared some time ago. It was a huge log folder which I deleted after uninstalling the app. Mopping up a bit now. No rush as I have reclaimed a huge amount of space. I'll need to remember how to view hidden files.

 

[amaze1499]

Thanks! The offender was an incompatible drive utility which I hadn't used since a bug appeared some time ago. It was a huge log folder which I deleted after uninstalling the app. Mopping up a bit now. No rush as I have reclaimed a huge amount of space. I'll need to remember how to view hidden files.

Command-Shift-period to show hidden files.