Hard Drive Randomly filling up - HELP!

M

Mushu

Registered
Got a G4 450mhz running OSX 10.2.8. 2 HDs, one 18Gb, one 80Gb and 1.25Gb RAM. The pooter set up so that the system and all the apps etc run off the smaller of the two HDs (although Photoshop etc use the 80Gb as a scratch disc) the 80Gb HD is just used for storage.

The smaller of the two Hds seems to be filling up, ie although the system and applications etc on the HD only amount to about 4GB it says there is only 191MB available. Where the hell has the other 14GB gone! Becuase of the lack of spare disc space I couldn't open classic this morning so had to delete a load of MP3's :( leaving me with about 900mb of disc space. Classic will now start up so I could at least get on with some work. However after using the machine for a couple of hours I am now down to about 400mb of spare disc space even though i haven't saved any files to this HD. What is chewing on my disc space??
 
Ok just had a thought it could be that ps files are going awol when i make PDfs. I've done a search for .ps files but that doesn't seem to work, is there any way they could be hidden?
 
I would do a Find on the smaller HD, as you should have some really large files there.(maybe PS is not really using the big drive for a scratch disk, you should verify that). Press CMD-F to open Find, click add criteria for visibilty, choose 'ALL' in the dropdown beside visibilty, add criteria for size, click 'is greater than', then type 50,000 in the KB block, don't type anything in the File Name. Click the drop down 'Search In', choose specific places, un-select all drives except your smaller boot drive, and click Search. You can sort the results by size, and you should be able to see exactly what is loading up your HD (and you can trash files that you are certain could be trashed from that window) leave a post here if you're uncertain about what can be trashed, someone here can give you guidance, if you need it.
 
2 things:

do you use Final Cut Express? I had somewhat the same thing happening, and realized I hadn't set the disks for FCE properly. So while projects and stuff were saving to my large firewire drive, the RENDER files were saving to my smaller local drive.
But maybe you're not using FCE...


Do you use konfabulator? There's a sweet new-ish widget for download from their site (I just dl'd it yesterday) called Magic Space Bus.
You can set it to tell you what directories are using up what percentage of your Disk space. it'll at least allow you to narrow down your search, and maybe figure out why there are files in that location that fill up your drive!

hope that helps a little.
 
Sorted ta...it was the .ps files I just didn't know about the visibility thing in the find window. 13gb of .ps files, no wonder it was struggling!!

thanks again
 
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