Filed under: Troubleshooting
CSI Mac: How did that file get so big?
I don't know much about real-world forensics, except for what I see on television, but one thing I do know is that when you're faced with a troubleshooting mystery, you have a couple of choices: shrug your shoulders and fix the problem, or figure out what went wrong in the first place to try and prevent it from coming back again. While I don't always have the time or the smarts to suss out the root cause of every Mac issue, sometimes the issue is so curious and the cause so interesting that I feel compelled to investigate until I get to the bottom of it.
Recently, when one of my colleagues came in with a slightly-full hard drive, I went to my go-to disk space checker (the capable OmniDiskSweeper) to see where we could save a gigabyte or two. In addition to the usual suspects of iTunes podcasts long gone stale and legacy backups of Entourage databases, I came across the file you see above; it lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Chess. Why on earth would a support file for Chess.app be 1.5 gigabytes? That's crazy talk. I would love to delete it, but a file that large... might be useful or important.
Where did this bulky bucket of bits come from? Read on for the answer.
As you may remember, CBS's president of digital media Larry Kramer 
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