What's filling up my hard drive?

V

valiant66

Registered
On Friday I had 140 GB free on my boot drive. Sunday morning I woke up to the "Your boot drive is full" warning message, and was down to 234 MB free. I deleted about 10 GB worth of files, and this morning had about 900 MB free.

Just in case it was something in a browser, I quit all my browsers Sunday night, but the hard drive still filled up.

Obviously something somewhere is running amuck and filling up my drive.

How do I find out what it is?
 
Start terminal.app. Type

sudo find / +ctime +1
Click to expand...

It will list all files that are created (or changed) during last day. I bet there are lots of that should be there, but you might find files that should not.

That worked if there were several small files. But it there is one big file, try something like

sudo find / -size +1G
Click to expand...

for files that are larger than 1 gigabyte, or +100M for files that are larger than 100 megabytes.
 
Hmm.

The first command find returns tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of results. When I killed it it was chewing its way through /Applications/Adobe. It looks like it's returning every file but it's hard to tell since my buffer runs out before I get back to the top.

But!

The second one seems a bit better, and probably provides the clue. (In my head the word "clue" is pronounced by Inspector Clouseau...)

I have many, many entries titled like this:

/Library/Application Support/TechTool Protection/Trilby2000/Directory Backup 2010-10-11-07-48-06

Two from today alone, but on average 8 per day previously, back to 2010-08-05.

So now all I have to do is figure out how to fix TechTool, I guess.

Thanks for the tip!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top