This is a quick update. Yes. I know I say that a lot (or at least, I certainly think it when I start a post). This one really will be quick.

First, background. My main computer, a 2018 Intel Mac Mini, has been having its internal drive fill up. Regularly. To the point that apps crash without warning overnight, backups fail, Mail stops working, etc. In February, I traced the main source of the problem to a folder called SpotlightKnowledgeEvents (I’m just gonna say SKE most of the time.) At the time, this folder had over 37 gigabytes of data in it.

I then spent time carefully testing different settings to make sure that 1) I’d definitely found the problem, and 2) there wasn’t a simple setting I could switch to make the problem go away. In my third post on the problem I clarified a few of the more arcane things I’d been seeing, and came up with a general approach to managing the problem.

Since then: I haven’t done anything. Mostly, I’ve been watching the problem to see if it goes away, and when the disk gets full, deleting the SKE folder so it can start all over again.

Sequoia 15.4

Then, 15.4 came out¹. Could this fix it? I hoped so. I upgraded on April 7, and the first thing I noticed – the folder was gone! Huzzah!

But within a couple days, my disk usage was climbing again. I discovered… the SKE folder wasn’t gone, it was just moved - from ~/Library/Metadata (all by itself), into Metadata/CoreSpotlight. After it passed 20 gigs, I deleted the data, then watched over the next four days as it continued to climb again. At one point (very early morning on April 15), my disk actually reached 99.9% full. Again, I deleted it all, and again, it started coming back.

On April 17, the SKE folder was at about 5 gig, and right about then, 15.4.1 came out. I updated the system, and after it rebooted – the folder (still there) had been emptied!

This made me very hopeful, because my main theory for why this was happening was that:

• The data was being written to the wrong folder
• The data was being “deleted” from the right folder (that is, the system went to where it expected to find it, and tried to delete it, but since it’d been placed in the wrong location, it never got deleted)
• The 15.4 update finally got the data writing to the right place, but deletion was still broken
• The 15.4.1 update deleted it, and so…it’s fixed!

Right? Right?

Wrong. Just under five hours after updating, the folder was back to nearly 5 gig. As I write this (10:15 on the next day, April 18), it’s near 10 gig. It’s been pretty closely following the same pattern I saw after updating to 15.4.

So, yeah. Still broken. I’m still manually deleting things, just hoping it’ll go away. I’m still hoping that at some point an automatic cleanup will kick in, and so I’m reluctant to add any auto-deletion process to the system. But I may just need to do that.

Maybe 15.5 will finally make it go away?