Hard drive space disapearing

O

ocular

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Something very strange is happening to my powerbook (G4 1.67GHz, 1.5Gb RAM, OSX10.4). My available space on my hard drive keeps disapearing to the point of me delete/moving 1.5Gb of files off my internal hard drive this morning, and now, half four, I have got only 151.5Mb available (and decreasing). All I have been doing is surfing the net and making few things on photoshop (I have checked the size of the files I've been making and they're all in folder which is less than 10Mb big.
Then while I was working on photoshop I got a general error saying: "Start up memory full" and that I should make some space. Unfortunatly I cleared the msg before I realised the full problem. Any ideas?
 
The best tool I found for location large files is OmniDiskSweeper. It will help you locate folders that for some reason have gotten out of control. Most likely it could be one of your log folders.
 
Thanks, I downloaded Omnidisksweeper and found my photoshop temperoary files are getting huge. Thing is though, Omindisksweeper can find this file but I cannot in finder, nor with spotlight. The File is in users>me>shared>library>caches>cleanup at startup. But this folder, I cannot locate either. The file is called "photoshop temp291264". I could delete it through onmidisksweeper, but they want me to pay to use the delete button in the programme. Call me a cheapskate, but I'd rather try and sort this out for free before.
However, this does not explain all of the lost memory. I'll keep searching for the rest of it.

By the way, the memory is returned when I restart (forgot to say last time). But after using photoshop again the memory seems to get lost. I need to use photoshop at the moment for work, so there won't be an extended period soon when I won't be using the programme to see if the problem is isolated there.

Also, I haven't changed any settings in my photoshop preferences. The memory and image cache settings say: "Cache Levels": 4; "Use cache for histogram levels" is unticked; "Memory usage: Available RAM: 1396; Maximum used for Photoshop": 50%

The only other thing I can think of is that I installed Motion 2 recently. But I have not opened it this restart so I am doubtful this has anything to do with it
 
Update:
Just tried to find a large video file that Omnidisksweeper found, went to open it but it opened iPhoto instead (clicked on wrong icon in spotlight). This cained the last of my hard drive space. So the prob is not isolated to photoshop. I then got the warning dialogue box that I saw yesterday, I shall quote:
"Your startup disk is almost full.
you need to make more space available on your start up disk by deleting files"
Thanks in advance for any help
 
Try doing a search in the finder for invisible items. The file should show up then. See if you have any photoshop cache files that persist after the program is closed
 
When I close photoshop, some of the space is returned, but not all of it. I cannot seem to locate the rest of it, even with easyfind. Will keep looking. Any ideas why this is happening and what I can do to resolve it? Thanks
 
Hi, been a few days, but I finally got round to finding where the missing hard drive space is that remains lost after I close certain programs. It is in the the following location:
Macintosh HD>private>var>vm
There are files called swapfile0 thru to swapfile5 at the moment. They all have sizes that are multiples of 2, ie 64MB, 128MB and 256MB. Interesting. Further, when I try to delete them using WhatSize, it says that I cannot move them to the trash, but when I look in the trash, there they are, but cannot be deleted. I have 'Force Empty Trash', this empties the trash, but the files are still in there original place.

Why is all this happening? What can I do to stop it? How can I delete this files without restarting? Help!
 
the problem is that your hard drive is too small for all the info you have on it. the system by itself makes rather large files, the biggest being the vm swap file. if when you first turn on your mac, and you have less than 3gig free, its time to get a bigger hard drive, or to clean alot off the drive. on a normal night for me, especially if i'm doing alot of picture and video editing with alot of different apps open, my hard drive will lose 5gig to temp files, and at the next boot, i'll have it all back. its just the way os x does things.
 
that directory is for your Virtual memory swap files.
The only way you can delete them is in terminal with sudo command. But I'm not sure if you should be deleting them.
How much memory do you have on your system?
 
I've an 80GB Hard drive and I've less than 3GB space on there. I'll get rid of some and see what happens. It sounds (from sinclair_tim's post) that that is the problem. I'll let you know if it still does it. I'm just glad its normal and not that something has happened to my comp :)
 
For the drive to work properly, you should have at least
8 GB free space (10% of 80 GB) and preferably 12GB
free space (15% of 80 GB)
 
I have a similar problem as ocular. I have found a /private/var/log/windowserver_last.log that is 9 gb big. i have tried to delete it but it is in use. how can i empty the log?
 
dont' know how comfortable you feel using the terminal, but this command should do it:

cd /private/var/log/
sudo rm -f windowserver_last.log

you will be prompted for your machine password.

GL
 
Definitely _don't_ move or delete the swap files located in /private/var/vm/.

Best not to mess with any of the system files. Look for big stuff in your home directory, that is your user directory.

Doug
 
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