Fusion Disk Space Hungry on my Mac

[bigjess_sc]

I have a 500GB SSD on my Mac and while my VM size is 109G, it seems to be restricting me from accessing the space on my MAC and  reserving way more data than it should for my VM. In short, I'm looking for ways to make more space available on my MAC to use instead of it being hogged up by my infrequently used VM Fusion machine.   I have defrag'd, reclaimed, and done everything in the forums I could find. I also changed my disk on the WIN7 machine to dynamic, but still couldn't shrink it. The only other thing worth noting is that my disk is 'sparse' and not broken up into 2GB blocks. In short, it seems as if Fusion is reserving triple the disk space of the VM itself which is a major frustration. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I work with some really smart VM guys that suggested exporting / importing into vCenter, shrinking and all other sorts of things but I'm still not sure that would solve my problem. Thanks in advance for any solid advice here.

Details Below:

I ran OmniDisk Sweeper on my Mac and it is showing total space used as 195G. Image attached

On my Windows machine, I have tried to shrink through VMtools and CLI, to no avail. No matter what I do to the other partition, I can't free up the space. Image attached.

[a_p_]

I'm not a MAC user, so I may be missing something, but I cannot see any issues regarding the disk space!?

The "Virtual Machines" folder shows ~127GB, and the VM's total size is 119GB. With the 119GB plus some additional data (e.g. swap files, caches, ...) the ~127GB seem to be ok. The Windows Disk Management also shows ~142GB total size with ~25GB free, which makes ~117GB used?

Please  explain where you see the mentioned triple disk space reservation.

André

[bigjess_sc]

Sorry I didn't include this - here is the total space used on my MAC with lots showing 'other' that doesn't show in the OmniDisk Sweeper.

[a_p_]

Is the disk/SSD partitioned, i.e. does it contain e.g. a Bootcamp partition?

André

[bigjess_sc]

Nope

[a_p_]

Does df -h from the command line, and File -> Get Info for the volume (in the Finder) show the same usage as shown in the "Storage" tab.

André

[bigjess_sc]

no - it is different...

[a_p_]

Sorry, but as mentioned before, I'm no MAC user. All I could think of at the moment is that there are hidden files on the disk.

Maybe wila‌ reads this, and has more ideas!?

André

[dariusd]

Looks like OmniDisk Sweeper is finding and traversing hidden files/folders... they are showing up in the screenshot you posted.

Have you tried rebooting your Mac and seeing if that clears up the space?  The next thing to try would be running Disk Utility and using the First Aid tab on your Macintosh HD to see if that reports/fixes any problems.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[wila]

Hi,

A couple of remarks, I noticed that in your Windows your disk is partly unallocated.

The 68.36GB that is unallocated cannot be reclaimed by Fusion if it is already taking up space. It needs to have an ntfs partition for that, so either add a partition (or better imo) extend your partition to use the full disk.

Second, as André already mentioned, it only looks like the VM is taking up what it said. Not more.

Your disk appears to be using more as what Disk Sweeper shows. I'm not familiar with the program, but for the same purpose I do tend to use GrandPerspective.

If you rather use the console to hunt down where your data hogs are then use the "du" command.

As

du -hs /users/iwhite/Documents/*

--

Wil

[bigjess_sc]

Thanks for the tip on Grand Perspective. It showed something very strange:

The grey box is represented as 241GB of Misc Space. What does that mean?

[wila]

Hi,

Strange, never seen that.

Can you right click on the grey blob and select "Reveal in Finder" ?

Hopefully that shows some details.

--

Wil

[bigjess_sc]

No, doesn't give me any options. I did some research however and it may be one of two things (or at least this is the path I'm following now)

1. Spotlight Indexes - I've excluded the SSD from Spotlight, then added it back and removed the VM Folder. This has forced a reindex (in progress now)

2. I've killed the time machine process. Some other posts I've seen are leaning to TM snaps that the OS creates inherently...

[a_p_]

Because nobody mentioned this so far (although I guess you already did this), I'd like to ask whether you emptied the trash (for all accounts, if there's more than one).

André

[bigjess_sc]

Of Course. Interesting find though... I can see now that the Application Support is harnessing the files...

Getting closer:

[bigjess_sc]

I think I figured it out. I run a Cisco malware client called AMP (advanced malware protection) for my company and all the SCANS / history of each file state was being held, not purged at all. Essentially 235 GBytes of uselessness. I 'rmdir' -f -r and it is churning now. We'll see if this fixes it and i get my disk back...

Hopeful in Charlotte...

[bigjess_sc]

It fixed it... Drive now has lots of free space.

Thanks to all for your help in finding these phantom folders...

[wila]

Hi,

Cool, great to hear you tracked it down and fixed it.

Sometimes there's nothing better as a command line when GUI tools don't provide the answer

--

Wil