Troubleshooting

A scan seems slow or stuck

Why a MoreRoom scan can take longer than usual — huge folders, network or slow external drives, privacy prompts — and what to do about it.

By the MoreRoom team, Yando Pte. Ltd.This page as Markdown

In short

  • A whole Mac usually takes seconds to a minute. Millions of small files, slow external disks and network shares take longer.
  • As long as the file count keeps rising, the scan is working. Analysing… comes at the end and is short.
  • Stuck for good? Click Cancel (Esc), exclude the huge folder in Settings › Exclusions, and scan again — or scan a smaller place first.

Is it really stuck?

While scanning, MoreRoom shows “Scanning place…” with the number of files and bytes found so far, updated several times a second. When it can estimate the total — from your last scan of the same place, or from the space used on the startup disk — a ring shows the progress.

  • If the numbers keep going up, the scan is working, just on a lot of files.
  • Analysing place… — “Matching hundreds of known space consumers” — is the last step. It takes a few seconds on large scans.

Common reasons it takes longer

  • Millions of small files: node_modules, Git repositories, Photos libraries, mail archives, developer caches. MoreRoom handles about a million files in seconds on a recent Mac, but every file counts.
  • External or network disks: a USB hard disk, a NAS or a cloud drive with files only online is much slower to read than the internal SSD. Disk Tools measures how fast a drive really is.
  • Time Machine backup disks: they contain huge numbers of files. Scanning one is rarely useful; macOS manages that space itself.
  • Other heavy work: a Spotlight reindex, a backup or a big copy running at the same time slow every app that reads the disk.

What you can do

  1. Click Cancel (or press Esc) — you go back to the home screen, nothing has been changed.
  2. Scan a smaller place first: Home Folder instead of Scan My Mac, or a single folder with Choose a Folder….
  3. Exclude folders you never want to clean — a big archive, a backup, a NAS mount — in MoreRoom › Settings… › Exclusions. They’re skipped entirely on the next scan.
  4. Next time, a rescan (⌘R) runs in the background and keeps the current results on screen.

No Full Disk Access?

Without Full Disk Access, MoreRoom skips the folders that would make macOS ask for permission, so it never waits on a prompt. If you see macOS permission prompts during a scan, see macOS keeps asking for permission.

“Scan failed”

If a scan ends with Scan failed and a message, the place may have been disconnected or become unreadable (an external disk ejected, a network share dropped). Reconnect it and scan again. If it keeps failing, contact us with the message and your MoreRoom and macOS versions.