Out of Space, but drive not full

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pan1k

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I have 4 250gig drives partitioned as follows:
1 50g partition for Os X (including apps)
1 5g partition for swap
1 100g partition for my Home Dir
1 130g partition for my music
1 183g partition for storage
1 466gig partition for my swap disk (video editing)

My system partition is 50 gigs, and if I get info on all the visible folders, I've used 25gigs, but when get info on the drive it says I've used 49gigs. What gives? I defragged, and ran macjanitor to no avail. Why am I out of space already? I do have alot of applications installed, but my apps folder is only 15gigs.

If anyone has any idea of why this has happened, and how I can free the space up, let me know. I am not an expert in os x/unix, but I'm not afraid of complicated answers, I figure this is how you learn.
 
From MacFixIt;

Disappearing hard drive space -- Log files usually the culprit We continue to cover an issue where available space on the startup volume rapidly declines autonomously under Mac OS X 10.3.8.

In many cases, this issue is caused by problematic hardware device drivers or other software components that rapidly record error messages to system logs, causing them to swell and occupy previously free space.

As previously covered in early February, MacAlly's iShock driver is notorious for this behavior under Mac OS X 10.3.8 and is a prime case example for this issue.

The iShockXDriver application has an apparent incompatibility with Mac OS X 10.3.8 that causes repeated error entries to the system.log file, causing the file to swell to sometimes enormous sizes (several gigabytes). MacAlly has since released an updated driver -- version 1.0.4 -- that resolves this issue.

Other devices can cause the disappearing drive space problem as well, however, and once they have generated the abnormally large log files, there are a few methods for deleting them and re-claiming lost space.

The easiest method is to use the Console application located in the Applications/Utilities folder on a normal Mac OS X installation. Once you have launched this application, click the "Logs" button in the top navigation bar, and select the offending (swollen) log file. Press the "Clear" button to delete its contents.

What if you're not sure which log file is swelling? Mac OS X log files are stored in the /var/log directory on a normal installation. This directory is invisible, however, so you will need to use Mac OS X's "Go to Folder" command (located in the "Go" menu in the Finder) in order to access it.
 
Thanks for the quick reply bob, unfortunately, it doesn't solve my problem.

the entire log dir is under a few megs.

I cannot find any hidden files over 1g either.

through terminal i did the following:
sudo du -af > out_put
which prints all the hidden files into a text file named out_put

egrep '[0-9]G' out_put
lists any of those files that would have over 1gig as its file size.
nothing came up that I didn't expect to.

There are no files under / that are hidden and over 1g, yet I'm missing around 15gigs of space.

I'm at a loss.
 
I figured out where my phantom 14gigs went.
I looked in /volumes/
and there was a folder there called "other partition"
it was a duplicate of my /users/ dir. I made sure it was a duplicate by looking at folders that I access alot and am familiar with the contents, this was an old copy at that. I got info and it was last modified nov 04. I have no idea how it got there, or why, but it did. I am sure that it is a copy, and not the actual volume, because seperate partitions show up as links, not as actual folders, this was a folder. I've put it in the trash for now, if I have any problems I can restore it, otherwise, after a few days, I'll just trash it. I'll remember to keep an eye on that dir, as it seems others have had strange problems with images lurking there for months at a time.

pan1k
 
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