hard drive space disappearing

C

cavaughan

Registered
Every now and again the space on my HD just starts disappearing. Usually I get a warning about too little space and I usually end up having to reboot to reclaim the space. Yesterday, however, this became a real problem when I left my computer for a long time and came back to find that I have 0 space.

Usually by running MacJanitor I can reclaim some space, but as I recall MacJanitor wouldn't even run.

Now the question is why is space being eaten up and by what? My only thought was that maybe I had received too much mail. I deleted a lot of mail, which couldn't even be written to the Trash as there was no space on the disk. Still there was additional space. I looked at the space being used under my profile and I saw I was using 5.8 Gb.

Finally, after rebooting, I now had about 2 Gb of free space on the HD. I looked to see how much space my profile used (hoping to somehow narrow down where files where being written) but my profile remained 5.8 Gb.

Any ideas?

Curits
 
Sounds to me like you have two distinctly different problems:

1. You probably have an application that's eating ungodly amounts of memory. The space that re-appeared after rebooting was probably taken up by virtual memory files. If a buggy program leaks memory for long enough, it this will fill your entire disk. I can't say what application would cause this. The only real memory leak I've ever encountered in my years with OS X was mlnet/mldonkey, and the various applications based around it (like mlMac).

2. Your home folder is cluttered. It's not always easy to track down where disk space is being used. The simplest way to do it is to open your Home folder, change it to list view, and in the View Options window (under the View menu), check the "Calculate all sizes" box. Now wait for OS X to calculate all your folder sizes (this can take quite a while). This will show you which folders are using how much space.

My best guess is that this space is all perfectly legit — perhaps an mp3 collection in your Music folder? You might also have some excessively large caches in your Library that need to be cleared, though.
 
I had this happen. I had to copy data to another drive and reformatted the problem drive. I never figured out the problem, and this has happened a few times.

I do recall a file that had some enormous file size, not sure how, but it was a few gigs, deleted that and that cleared that problem up. So check around, maybe one of your files took on a lot of extra blocks. That has happened to me a few times as well.

I think i used Toast to get the file values, and that found the file, because the Finder didn't show the file at the appropriate enlarged size.
 
Check the log files with Console. If an application is repeating an error and logging it, it will add up quickly.
 
You can use "WhatSize" to check the sizes of your folders and documents (?)--at least your folders.
 
There was a bug that would cause some log files to go out of control on Panther Client, some as well for Server too. If you feel comfortable, open up the terminal and do the following:

cd /var/log
du -sh

That will return a human readable number. Also, do the following:

cd ~/Library/logs
du -sh

Also:

cd /Library/logs
du -sh

See if any of the returned values seem excessively high. :)
 
One cause for the runaway log files is the MacAlly iShock driver... got one of those installed? I think they've got an updated driver on their site that corrects this.
 
Well the file i had wasn't a log file, it wasn't even on the system partition, not even the same hard drive. I think i posted on this some time ago.
 
Go3iverson said:
There was a bug that would cause some log files to go out of control on Panther Client, some as well for Server too. If you feel comfortable, open up the terminal and do the following:

cd /var/log
du -sh

That will return a human readable number. Also, do the following:

cd ~/Library/logs
du -sh

Also:

cd /Library/logs
du -sh

See if any of the returned values seem excessively high. :)
Click to expand...

I've had a similar problem, hard drive space seems to fall to about 4GB no matter what.

I tried what you suggested and received 1.8m, 2.2.m, and 960k as my numbers. Is that ok?
 
Convert said:
I've had a similar problem, hard drive space seems to fall to about 4GB no matter what.

I tried what you suggested and received 1.8m, 2.2.m, and 960k as my numbers. Is that ok?
Click to expand...


Yeah, those are fine, so that's not an issue. I had a problem during 10.3 beta when I was testing DirectoryService integration where I began a process, went to lunch and found my whole 60GB (at the time) hard drive was full! :)
 
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