home directory size problem

I checked ~/Library in my environment. It's using about 35 GB. If your account had been on the system volume, you could have used Manage Storage (see below) to analyze.

Using a recent Time Machine backup, you could consider running the Migration Assistant to make a duplicate of your account with only the user files. That way you could assess which capabilities would be affected by not having access to the files stored in (the old) ~/Library.

The problem with the command is because you have spaces in your drive name.

It thinks that /Volumes/Sandisk is one thing, and SSD/peterkwee is another, when in reality there should be

just one full path.

Try it this way - note the quotes around $HOME:

du -hx "$HOME" | sort -h

Peter Kwee wrote:

The actual culprit appears to be the Library folder which takes up a whopping 516GB!

Try using an app like Daisy Disk or Disk Space Analyzer to examine the drive and the ~/Library folder.

I recently did the same and discovered multiple iPhone backups taking up over 120GB. They are stored in ~/Library.

Also, if you are using Mail, MS Outlook or other 3rd party email apps, they also store their data in ~/Library and can take up a lot of space.

If I remember correctly, the Migration Assistant allows you to recover your existing files to a new user account (select the option to keep the old account). As a first step, you can transfer only your user files (don't select system files and settings). I presume that, in such a case, all or most of your library will not be transferred. You may have to manually restore some settings and even reinstall/reconfigure some third party software.

Assuming that the new account is acceptable, you could ultimately delete the old account.

By the way, navigating the library hierarchy can be difficult since it's hard to determine the impact from removing a particular file or folder.

Running EtreCheck can list all the 3rd party agents and daemons that startup on your system, as well as your Startup Items. None of the 3rd party stuff starts when you boot into Safe mode, so they are a likely source of your boot problems.

https://etrecheck.com/

The "Free" version is all you need to generate a report. You do not need to pay for EtreCheck. And if you want to see what a typical EtreCheck report looks like, just search the discussions.apple.com forums and you will find thousands and thousands of EtreCheck reports:

If you wish to post the EtreCheck report in an "Additional Text" box, someone in the forum will help you analyze it

Yes, it is an Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal command. It will find all the files under your home directory, sort them so that last files displayed will be the largest, which would be the logical place to start looking for where you storage has gone.

NOTE: Most users that are unfamiliar with the Terminal use the term "Folder". Your use of the word "Directory" made me think you were an experienced Terminal user. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

OmniDiskSweeper (Free) GUI for finding where all your storage has gone.

http://www.omnigroup.com/more

OmniDiskSweeper is a tool for finding where all your storage has gone.

Just be careful about what you delete.

du -hx $HOME | sort -h       # this will take a few minutes, maybe longer if you have 601GB under your home directory

You can use the "System Information" app to see if you are booted into Safe mode.

Applications -> Utilities -> System Information -> Software -> Boot Mode: Safe vs Normal