u/Apticx

Spent a lot of time working on those drums. Very happy how it turned out.

Hey everyone, hope this is the right flair for this.

If you dont care about how i solved it and the steps i took scroll down for the solution.

--- my Issue / how i solved it ---

The past 2 days I have been searching and looking for a fix for "other" storage taking up the majority of my files on a 2012 Mac mini running Catalina.

I just freshly installed it after getting it used and had some trouble with iCloud downloading all kinds of irrelevant data onto my Mac and I unchecked "optimize Storage".

iCloud then stopped working altogether and i rebooted the mac after leaving it "do nothing" for over an hour.

This somehow entirely screwed up everything and when icloud turned back on I now had that massive junk of Data that was nowhere to be found.

I tried all kinds of Apps like Disk Inventory X (treesize) which perfectly listed the size of all my files but could not identify any of the "other" space and almost gave up at that point.

Pretty much all solutions i found online to "fix" this issue is to just reinstall. I really dont want to do that because i just did this and it took many hours for this slow thing to get it together.

So i decided to manually dig deeper.

When navigating to your hdd (you can enable this view in your finder settings) i started rightclicking every folder (Users, Library, etc...) and get info.

This now took a while to inventory all of my files but once it was done I could pinpoint it some more and all that trash was located in my User directory.

When navigating to the User folder and rightclicking -> get info each of those, they did not store those data masses. It was "gone" again / hidden.

So i opened the terminal and entered: "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true; killall Finder" without the ""

This forces finder to always display all hidden files. You can undo this by entering the same command but replace "true" with "false" after boolean.

Now i was able to rightclick -> get info my way through the structure.

Because I knew the cause was iCloud i looked into "bird" which is the process name for iCloud and found it. I kept digging deeper until i ended up in a caching folder which i then deleted.

After restarting iCloud those massive filedumps were now gone and icloud works as intended again.

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--- the fix ---

Important info: We will be modifying hidden files which are often system files you as a user are not meant to access so make sure your mac is backed up first / time machine backed up and all important data is synced to icloud. There is a possibility this will require you to reinstall your mac in the end but you would need to do that anyways if this wouldnt work.

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1. get info on your HDD -> keep moving down following the trail of the data.

If you get stuck because you see a folder to be way bigger in size than its contents then you found it.

2. Put "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true; killall Finder"
   into your terminal to force finder to display all hidden files at all times.

3. Navigate back into that folder and you should now see hidden folders too.

Keep doing that -> get info until you find a folder that resembles the excess filesizes.

4. In my case / in case of iCloud sync issues the folder will be called "bird"

Look for anything called "cache" inside that massive directory and rename it by adding .old or something afterwards. As example: "bird" -> "bird.old"

5. Now check if the tool that this cache folder is located in automatically creates it again empty / works after closing and opening it again.

If it still works -> delete the renamed directory and empty the trash can

If it breaks -> rename / remove the .old and dive one layer deeper.

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I hope this was able to help at least one of you because this really drove me nuts.