iMazing taking up 200GB of drive space!

[MacInWin]

The free space on my internal SSD had declined a bit ago. I've been trying to cull what I can and move what I can off the internal to a external drive. Daisy Disk informed me that iMazing was taking up just under 200GB of the drive, about 194GB. Investigating it showed that the space was in ~/Library/Application Support/iMazing/Backups. Ah, that sort of makes sense in that I have an iPhone with 143GB used and an iPad with 110GB used and I've backed them up using iMazing. Easy to fix.

So I go to iMazing preferences and set the default backup location to my external drive and do new backups on both the iPhone and iPad. Delete the prior backups through iMazing, get back all happy-happy results.

So let's see how much space I've recovered. Oops, Get info on the drive says exactly the same. Nothing in the trash. Daisy Disk reports that iMazing was taking up 194GB, this time in a subfolder named "Versions" in ~/Library/Application Support/iMazing.

Ah, that must be the "archiving" location. Enter iMazing, turn off archiving on both devices. No change.

Getting more aggressive now, use Finder to locate the Versions folders, drag both to the trash and empty the trash. Run Daisy Disk and WTH? They both have reappeared in ~/Library/Application Support/iMazing/Versions!

Maybe it's because iMazing mini is running in the top bar. Stop that, repeat the delete, repeat Daisy Disk. Files reappeared again. Look in Activity Monitor, don't see anything related to iMazing running.

So, braintrust, how do I make iMazing stop stealing 194GB of drive space? I am thisclose to just getting rid of iMazing even though it's otherwise a great product. Do I have to uninstall it and then reinstall, reconfigure and start all over to get that space back? I looked at the iMazing website and didn't see anything on how to recover that space.

 

[chscag]

I'm doing some checking right now Jake. I have Path Finder set to show hidden files and folders and should be able to see where iMazing is using space. I might add that the customer support folks at iMazing are always very responsive to questions and usually will respond the same or next day.

I'll let you know.

 

[chscag]

I just went thru all options of iMazing and checked space used. I'm not showing any excess amount of drive space being used. Additionally, I went to the folders you indicated above and it appears that iMazing was only keeping the last one or two backups and associated information. I'm currently backing up 2 iPhones and 1 iPad.

I may have options set differently from you though so not sure what it all means. Also, I do not use iMazing Mini.

 

[pm-r]

how do I make iMazing stop stealing 194GB of drive space?

Rather interesting!!!

I just did a quick chek on "iMazing" items using Find Any File.app and there seem to be rather oreiller large number of what appear to be surplus stuff and questionable resources that I had never really noticed before. Hmmm...??? I'm curious to learn what you find out and then I may dig into my own iMazing stuff myself and see if I can find what's what.

Curious question...???:
= Why would imazing Mini have 845 custom icons ("Emojis") sitting in a resources folder???
= why do I seem to have for several what appeared to be duplicate "backups"???

Thanks for the heads up/



- Patrick
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[ferrarr]

Why do you think iMazing is using too much space? As far as I can tell, iMazing backups should be using more than 250GB if you’re backing up both devices?

I have 4 devices I backup using iMazing, but they are across three macOS user accounts, and they only take up about 30GB space?

What settings are you using for iMazing for Automatic Backups and Backup Archiving? I have mine set to backup weekly, and save backups for 1 month? So I have 4 backups of each device.


Sent from my iPad using Mac-Forums

 

[MacInWin]

Bob, I fully expect the backups to take a lot of space. That's why I put them on EXTERNAL drives and not the internal drive in the MBP. That 200GB is in addition to the 250GB taken up on the external drive. So if I look at it in total, the backups of two devices that have a total of about 250GB of data are over 450GB, 250GB on the external and another 200GB still on the internal. I just want that internal space back. My settings in iMazing all point to that external drive, both as the default and for each iDevice. I do manual backups, only want one, no history, so I deleted all old backups when I made the new one today. I can't afford 4 backups because I'd need 2TB of space for that, given how it's going.

 

[IWT]

@Jake

I know how unhelpful it is for someone else to say that's not happened to me Fact is, my total iMazing BUs come out at just under 35GB (one iPhone, one iPad Pro - I BU my wife's devices on same Apple ID just to iTunes and not that frequently as she has little on them).

However, I may have found a solution for you.

If you are certain that your BUs are safely on your EHD, open iMazing > Preferences > General > Clear iMazing Cache - as in this screenshot:



I think that that should clear your BUs??

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

Ian, thanks, but we'll never know if that would have worked. I've totally eliminated all of iMazing, plan to start all over.

For those reading this later, I used AppCleaner to clean out most of the scat left all over the place by iMazing. Not all, but most. I found by using Find Any File more stuff in /private and ~/Library/Cookies that needed to be manually deleted, eventually got all of them gone, I think. I had to search both on DigiDNA and on iMazing.

So now I've recovered well over 200GB on my internal drive and 250GB on my external and am ready to try again afresh. Off to download the app again.

 

[ferrarr]

I can't afford 4 backups because I'd need 2TB of space for that, given how it's going.

I don't think that is how it works, but I may be wrong? Just like Time Machine, I believe they are linked to the original files? But, like I said, I could be wrong.

My 4 devices only take up 30 GB of space, that's for an iPhone 6, and an iPad Air 2, both 16GB, and an iPhone 8+ 64GB along with an iPad Pro 128GB. Here's the space used;

iPhone 8+ - 24GB available
iPad Pro - 87GB available
iPhone 6 - 4GB available
iPad Air - less than 1GB available

Edit: I also have my iMazing backups saved to Macintosh HD > Users > Shared, and I created an iMazing folder there, and all users share that folder for backups.

 

[pm-r]

I think that that should clear your BUs??

Gee, that sounds a bit drastic, but why would one Completely reset iMazing, and set it to Reset to Factory Settings.

That sounds a bit drastic for fixing some backup fix to me, or am I misunderstanding something.



- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

Bob, it totally depends on how much data is in the backup. In my case the two devices total about 250GB of data, so the backups should be about that size, given that I only have the one backup of each. The problem is that in addition to that 250GB there is an additional 200GB consumed on the hard drive that is NOT part of the backup in any way. And that's what I want back.

Patrick, the issue is that NOTHING I have tried has released as much as 1 byte of that 200GB of extra taken on the internal drive. The only thing that released it was to use AppCleaner and FAF to find and destroy every vestige of iMazing. I'm going to give it one more try and set the default backup location to that external drive again BEFORE I let any device attach to iMazing to see if doing it that way keeps the internal clean, but if I end up in the same boat of giving up 450GB of storage for 250GB of backup, I'll ditch iMazing totally. I'll report back.

 

[pm-r]

Patrick, the issue is that NOTHING I have tried has released as much as 1 byte of that 200GB of extra taken on the internal drive. The only thing that released it was to use AppCleaner and FAF to find and destroy every vestige of iMazing.

OK, and I wonder what they mean in an article I was reading when they say:

[iMazing] Make Time Machine style backups

WWDC Coverage Sponsor: Use iMazing to Manage all your iOS Devices - The Mac Observer

Is one supposed to use iMazing.app to delete the backups just like one is supposed to do with Time Machine??? Things sure don't look any different or special from any Finder type file or what Carbon Copy Cloner etc. would create to me.

But maybe they do use some sort of oddball file-linking but the normal Mac stuff doesn't see or can't cope with properly.

I await your further discoveries.



- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

Yes, they use links to files that are unchanged, much like TM does. So you need to delete backups through iMazing. But the issue I had was that after telling iMazing to use a different location for backups, making a backup to that location and deleting all other backups through iMazing, it did NOT release the 200GB of space it was taking. At one point the tech from DigiDNA said that to get the true space taken, you navigate in Terminal to the backup location and do a du -h command to get the real disk used. I did that, it totaled 200GB. So it may have had links, but despite being deleted, it didn't delete when iMazing was told to delete it.

I've now reinstalled and re-registered iMazing and am in the process of making the first backup. It's been about 1.5 hours and it isn't done. It keeps getting to about 20% done and then restarting. I've now changed cables and am trying again. No error messages, it just stops and cycles back to the beginning. I'm watching both the target drive, which is being written to, and the internal drive, which so far is not.

 

[MacInWin]

Well, it's been an adventure. Started the backup, as I said in the post #13 at 7:10 today, just a few minutes after 6 pm. It just finished for the second device. So that took 3 hours to do two backups totaling 250GB. Not fast, but at least it finished. Now for the results: The iMazin folder in ~/Library is 88MB, down from 200+ GB. The target drive where the backups are now shows 240GB using "du -h" in Terminal. Finder thinks that's 323GB, which is consistent with what DigiDNA said about space being double counted in macOS and Windows.

So, the lesson seems to be that if you install iMazing and just go with defaults, you could find that it will take a lot of disk space as it builds backups on backups. And, to me more importantly, if you start with the default and switch to an external later, as I did, it won't erase/release that internal space when you do that. So, my recommendation is that you decide where you want backups before you install iMazing, set that in Preferences before you attach any device. My SSD now has 200GB more free space than it did before I started this exercise and I am a happy camper.

 

[pm-r]

My SSD now has 200GB more free space than it did before I started this exercise and I am a happy camper.

Congratulations Jake, and good sleuthing, and that's a LOT of expensive SSD real estate, and especially so on a portable Mac.


- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

Thanks, Patrick. That was exactly why I started this adventure. My SSD was getting pretty full and to upgrade from a 1TB to a 2TB was going to be a pricey move. So I decided to take some things off the drive, but the iMazing backups proved pretty hard to get rid of. Now my drive has over 400GB free, I have a significant amount of money I don't have to spend and life is pretty good.

 

[IWT]

Your perseverance and dedication to problem solving is an example to all of us, Jake.

Well done.

Ian

 

[Rod]

I think the point about using iMazing to delete iMazing backups is an important one too. Time was when I frequently heard from OP's who had tried to delete TM backups by dragging them to the Trash as well. The simplest fix was to erase the TM backup empty the Trash and start again. Which is sort of what you did Jake.;D

 

[MacInWin]

Rod, that's true, but I did that only after iMazing failed to delete the backups. I really didn't have any choice, they would not go away in any other way. Normally, I would not recommend what I did for a casual deletion of a backup. What remains to be seen is what iMazing will now do when I make another backup of the iPad/iPhone and delete the older backup. It will be interesting to see if I get any space back on the External where everything is now supposed to be kept.

 

[ferrarr]

It will be interesting to see if I get any space back on the External where everything is now supposed to be kept.

@MacInWin, why do you think you should be getting space back?