More > JRiver Media Center 27 for Mac

Thumbnails taking up a lot of disk space

(1/4) > >>

Captain_Bitter:
First off, I'll admit I have a massive music library. My issue is I can't understand the disk space that thumbnails take up.

This week, I am rebuilding my entire library from scratch (don't ask) on a Mac Mini with a small hard drive (250GB). The actual library itself seems a reasonably small size, but the thumbnails.....

When I perform a ^i on the thumbnails, I get the following information:

Size: 1,335,560,747 bytes (62.95GB on disk) for 10 items. And this is still synching so is climbing gradually.

This is 1.3GB worth of thumbnails, but it takes up nearly 63GB in space! And the available disk space is dropping so it appears that the disk space used is "real".

FYI: I have between 1.2-1.3M tracks in my collection, so I expected the thumbnail creation would take 1-2GB. What I can't explain/understand is why the disk space is 70GB+ when the files themselves only seem to be taking up 1.3GB.

Can anyone explain how this works and/or why the space demands are so high? Or - as I suspect - is this some sort of glitch where the disk size used is climbing unnecessarily? If the latter, what can I do to fix this? 70GB or more will eat up most of my available disk space and I won't be able to load any more apps.

Thanks in advance, Dave

zybex:
That's a huge difference. The real space is the 1.3GB, the rest is perhaps temporary/cache/snapshots stored by the OS itself. While rebuilding thumbnails, MC is constantly rewriting the Thumbnails DB files which perhaps causes the OS to automatically generate Snapshots (backups) of the previous version of the file. You can clean these snapshots manually, see links below.

If it's an SSD, it's possible that the OS will eventually do a TRIM to recover the space once MC stops writing to the file. This "delayed cleanup" is a performance optimization.

Or Purgeable Storage?
https://osxdaily.com/2021/04/22/what-clear-purgeable-storage-mac/

APFS snapshots?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/11st1aq/just_recovered_60_gb_of_missing_capacity_by/

Captain_Bitter:
Thanks for the response, zybex. Yes, something weird is going on here, and it may indeed by MacOS-related. I decided to go the reboot route, so in doing so thought I would install a pending Sonoma update (14.3). Lo and behold - and before the machine restarted -- now my free disk space is showing 101GB free. However, when I go over to the thumbnails, I still see: 1.47GB used, 76.75GB on drive.

Soooooo:
1. it looks like the space was freed appropriately, but....
2. The space still shows incorrectly via "Get Info" (^i).

Really, really weird. I am rebooting now and will see what happens when the system starts back up.

Dave

Captain_Bitter:
That was a weird MacOS bug. I'm assuming it was MacOS, anyway.

Upgraded to Sonoma 14.3 and rebooted. After having some initial problem with Finder restarting, now the # of bytes and the storage space are in alignment. Whew -- at least I have a bunch of usable space back.

Thank you for your help. Zybex, the article you pointed me to was not the issue, but in that article they suggested rebooting (and updating if you had an update pending....which I did), and that seems to have solved the problem. At the same time, I also had a playback issue where the sound was muffled and distorted on all tracks, and that seems to have vanished, too. Odd.

And now, while I am updating more thumbnails, the problem is back in "Get Info".....but it doesn't seem to be impacting the actual disk space in Finder. Curiouser and curiouser.


Life is a mystery, Dave

Captain_Bitter:
Nope -- spoke too soon. The issue persists with the disk space getting eaten up. At this point, I think i'll just repair the thumbnails a little at a time, figure out how to recover the disk space and start back on the thumbnails. Just do this piecemeal.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page