The one that started it
An 8.8TB disk image and two years of pm2 logs
The one that started it
The largest single thing on my disk was a virtual disk image reporting 8.8TB while occupying about 10GB. That is what a sparse file looks like: it claims far more than it holds, and emptying it from the inside doesn't give the blocks back to macOS. Reclaim flags a file as sparse when its allocated size is under half its reported length and the gap is over a gigabyte, and shows both numbers so it's obvious what you are looking at.
The actual culprit was duller and much worse. A pm2 log directory had been collecting stdout and stderr from work services since the day I set the machine up. Nothing rotates those by default, so a service that logs on every request, or crash-loops quietly for a week, just grows the file forever. It had been running for two years.
How it's built
- Swift 6, SwiftUI: the app
- ReclaimCore: the engine, as a separate testable package
- TanStack Start: reclaim.echoeyecodes.com
- GitHub Actions: signed, notarised, released as a DMG
