Just lost 60GB of disk space

worldinquisitor

Registered
I've just lost ~60GB of disk space on my MacBook Pro.

The free space on my 500GB HD just dropped from 204GB to 143GB.

I recently had to create a temporary disk image on my HD using Disk Utility (it was to recover some data from another image ... long story). Once I'd finished with it, I unmounted the image then deleted the file. It just so happens that disk image was 64GB, so I suspect these two events are related.

I'm wondering if I somehow deleted the file before the image was fully unmounted and that there's disk space unnecessarily allocated somewhere .... or something like that.

I used Disk Utility to verify the HD. It found a few minor problems. I rebooted using Cmd-R to run Disk Utility to repair the disk, which all went fine.

I've also used Onyx to delete temporary files. And now I've run out of ideas.

Any thoughts?
 
Agh! Why does this always happen? Shortly after posting this, I found the solution (after hours of grappling with it).

I use Time Machine & Lion. Lion defaults to using local backups on the HD when the TM isn't available. It looks like it had saved a copy of the temporary disk image in MobileBackups. I turned off the MobileBackups feature (sudo tmutil disablelocal) which purged the backups & my disk space magically reappeared!

Phew!
 
Back
Top