Google

2015-04-25

Chrome Remote Desktop Eating Up Free Space

Last night, I noticed my iMac was a bit unhappy as it had run out of (250GB) SSD space. I recalled that the night before I had installed Google Drive and left it synchronizing and also had not yet moved the new Photos app to larger secondary drive, which was importing more and more photos in the last few days. By default Photos app installs at ~/Pictures. So they were both eating up precious SSD space.

To  move the Google Drive to secondary drive:
  • exited the app, 
  • moved the ~/Google Drive/ folder to second drive, 
  • restarted the app
  • Disconnected and reconnected the account choosing the new location where I moved the directory

To move the new Photos App to the secondary drive:
  • exited the app
  • moved the ~/Pictures/Photos.Library.photoslibrary to secondary drive, next to my iPhoto Library
  • Restarted the app
  • It detected the new location and prompted me to select the library.



April 22 was the earth day. So, today, I took my daughter to her school and together with her friends and their parents we cleaned up the school playground. 

I came back home and checked the Disk Utility to see if my clean up from yesterday had tidied things up enough. To my surprise, there was still a ton of space consumed by "something".

I launched my favorite tool "Disk Inventory X" which quickly detected that I had a 150Gig log file: 
/var/log/org.chromium.chromoting.log.0

Looking at the folder, it seemed that the log file was roller over, but the old log file somehow kept going and consumed the whole disk. This file is created by Google's awesome "Chrome Remote Desktop" extension which I really like to use. 

Unfortunately, there is currently an open issue for this case: 452121. It's not clear when this bug was introduced but it has been there for the last few versions of chrome (38..42) and some people have seen it eating up to a TeraByte of space, unless "remoting_me2me_host" process is killed and restarted with: 

killall -HUP remoting_me2me_host

Well, thanks Google for giving a reason to clean up ;)