After Effects 2022 consuming 700GB of storage in a day

[owsley_stanley]

I spent the last day creating an animation on my brand new iMac. I had about 700GB of storage when I started the project. By the next day I had 60GB.

- Clearing the cache under preferences did next to nothing.

- Purging the cache under edit had little to no effect as well.

- Manually deleting the media cache folders had no effect. 

- Restarting my computer had no effect.

- Uninstalling AE had no effect either.

- 3rd party disk cleaners cannot access the nearly 700GB of hidden files.

- Apple storage management classifies the files as "other" and does not allow me access to them beyond that.

How do I get my storage back?!

[Mylenium]

You probably can employ some weird terminal hackery, but to be honest it does not sound like this would be related to AE at all. To me it sounds more like your disk management is storing a lot of recovery data/ file version data for no good reason, which could indicate a deeper problem with your volume. If even third-party tools cannot access it, then I can see no way of fixing this easily. You most likely would need to boot into a blank terminal window even to be able to access those disk sections before the OS locks them again, so this sounds rather severe. Not a Mac guy, though, so you probably get better answers on some Mac nerd forum.

Mylenium 

[owsley_stanley]

I'm really quite certain it's AE related. I've never had this issue, clearly had plenty of working space before installing AE. I installed AE and got started on my animation the same day, and used my computer for nothing else for the next 24 hours.

As of now, I am get gradually getting more space back. Last night I had 60 gigs available, this morning it was 140, then 240, now this afternoon im back up to 300 someting gigs. But I'm stilling scratching my head about the remainting 400 gigs. I suppose I will wait it out.

[owsley_stanley]

Actually, related to what you suggested regarding the recovery data-- I was simeltaneously having an issue where AE was not allowing me to save, so I spent an entire day relying on the recovery feature without closing. I would "save" by queing up a render in ME, and it would then save the latest version in the recovery folder. I didn't close out of AE for more than 24 hours, until I noticed the storage hog. that's when I crossed my fingers and closed the project so I could re-open in an attempt to get my storage back. Luckily I did not lose any work.

Think these issues are related? Thank you for your response.