Disk Usage Woes: Day…whatever. How long has it been since I installed macOS Sequoia?
I’ve been struggling with the disk constantly filling up on my Mac Mini. See my lasttwo posts for a deep and wonky dive into the situation, and lots of data collection to confirm my suspicions (or not).
At this point, I’m still continuing to collect data, but it’s more in the realm of “just making more graphs for reference” than actually figuring anything out. I think the fix is pretty clear at this point: I need to delete extraneous data from time to time. I just now have a better idea where to find the best low-hanging fruit for deletion.
My main day-to-day machine is a 2018 Mac Mini. Over the last year, and especially the last 6 months, it’s been a struggle to keep adequate space free. About two weeks ago, I’d had enough, and went on a deep dive to figure out what was wrong. In my last post, I described the journey I took to identify the likely problem.
Simply identifying a “likely” culprit wasn’t enough, though. I needed to take a methodical approach to testing different settings and recording the results.
My everyday desktop is a 2018 Mac Mini. Last summer, I started noticing that some apps would crash overnight, mostly Ivory (my Mastodon client).
I assumed it was a memory thing. My disk space wasn’t great, but I had like 5 gigabytes or so free on the 256 gig drive, and wasn’t seeing any “your disk is full” errors. I wasn’t getting crazy “Your system is out of memory!” errors, either, but memory pressure seemed like a good explanation. I tried a few lazy tricks to get some data, try to collect logs, etc., but got nowhere.
Nine years ago, I migrated all my local house storage from a massive Dell with Debian and software RAID, onto a tiny little Synology NAS. Well, not exactly tiny, but probably 1/3 of the volume of the Dell. It serves as a file server, Time Machine target, and destination for various rsync and other low-level backup tasks from the rest of the network. At other times, it’s run a Plex server, the Channels DVR, and…I honestly don’t remember what else I’ve experimented with here. It’s a pretty capable little box.
Technology today is flat-out amazing. When I was a kid, walking uphill through the snow to get to school, cordless phones were massive (and amplitude modulated near the broadcast band), and video recorders had wired remotes. If you could quantify it, I’d venture that today’s capabilities are 3 or 4 orders of magnitude above what we had 30 years ago.
And at some point, almost without exception, I’ve hated every piece of technology I own.
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Mar 11, 2025 - 3000 Words -
