Hard Drive space seems to be missing

F

fuller.daniel

Registered
Hi,

I have a 30gb ibook and seems that my hardrive space is being invisibly taken up, but I can't figure out how or were. The total size of my home folder is 12gb and the total size of my applications is 5bg. I should have lots of room left.

I did install tiger and think that there may be a version of panther on the drive somewhere? Is that possible? Is tiger 11gb?

In any care, thanks in advance for the help.

Dan
 
So you have 12GB + 5GB = 17GB total taken up out of a 30GB drive... how much free space is showing? It should be somewhere between 10GB and 12GB according to that math, but you also didn't specify the size of the other folders on the drive as well.
 
There are a lot of hidden files on any System Disk, especially with tiger. Unfortunately they are necessary so you will lose a lot of space.
 
A clean, updated install of Tiger takes up roughly 4.8 GB. How big is your /System folder?

If it's much, much larger than that, you may need to empty your system cache. System Optimizer X does a good job of that.

Have you tried emptying your trash? I've ended up with about 12 GB of stuff in the trash due to gross negligence before.
 
Well, let's see. The "30 GB" are probably around 27 GB once the drive is formatted. 12 GB of home folder data, 5 GB of apps, so there's 10 GB left. The system might take up 2-3 GB (we're not recounting the apps installed by default here!), so you might have 7-8 GB left. Now there's virtual memory. Depending on how long your iBook has been running since the last restart and how many apps you've got opened etc., the space can get tight. How much _is_ currently free? How much after a reboot?

Just to compare... When I'm working with my PowerBook for a week and have many, many apps open with many, many documents open, my free harddrive space is about 2 GB. After a restart, I often find I have more than 5 GB available. So 3 GB was somewhere used as temporary cache or virtual memory.

I suggest to get OmniDiskSweeper. In demo mode (free), it lets you size your harddrive. You'll see in a good way what takes up how much space. The paid version also has a functioning "quick-delete" button, but you can, of course, also trash the things in the Finder instead of using that button, so the free version's already good enough.
 
OmniDiskSweeper doesn't "magically" make space, though. ;) It's just a tool to help you find culprits that take up too much space.
 
fryke said:
Just to compare... When I'm working with my PowerBook for a week and have many, many apps open with many, many documents open, my free harddrive space is about 2 GB. After a restart, I often find I have more than 5 GB available. So 3 GB was somewhere used as temporary cache or virtual memory.
Click to expand...
My experience with my iBook is almost identical.
 
If I remember right, once or twice I lost almost 5GB in swap files alone on my iBook.

Download MenuMeters (displays stats in the menubar) and enable the Memory feature. You can click on it and you'll get a contextual menu that'll show you how the memory is used, including the number and size of the swap files in use.

( yes, I know I seriously need more RAM :D )
 

Attachments

  • menumeters.jpg
    menumeters.jpg
    129.2 KB · Views: 5
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top