MacFilter: Where did all the space go?

July 13, 2005 1:18 AM

MacFilter: Where did all the space go? I was using my Powerbook (OS 10.4.1) last night and at last glance it had 4.5GB of space left. After working on iPhoto and Firefox, both of which hung for minutes during operation and while quitting, I got a message saying I was running out of disk space. It turned out I only had 200MB left. After rebooting, the space went up to 1.1GB. Is there any way I can find out where the space went and get it back?

I've already used disk utility to repair permissions and did the sudo daily, weekly and monthly tasks, to little avail. I have a feeling that the space might be eaten up by log files but I just don't know.

posted by adrianhon to computers & internet (7 comments total)

WhatSize might help.
posted by aneel at 2:01 AM on July 13, 2005

Try OmniDiskSweeper or WhatSize for navigating and finding where the space has gone.

Another thing you might want to check out is the /cores folder. It can get populated with all sorts of files that take up lots of disk space, especially if your Mac crashes or panics once in a while.
posted by gsb at 2:05 AM on July 13, 2005

Disk Inventory X is perhaps less practical, but lets you zero in on the really big files easily.
posted by aneel at 2:13 AM on July 13, 2005

I have, on occasion, noticed similar disappearing space issues. I suspect that it is indeed log/temp files, as I was able to make the space come right back by running OnyX and asking it to get rid of all such things.
posted by Dr. Sam at 7:27 AM on July 13, 2005

Where is my disk space?, via VersionTracker. Simple and effective.
posted by jruckman at 9:57 AM on July 13, 2005

While the various recommended software might all well be useful (I've used OmniDiskSweeper myself), I suspect that part of what happened to you last night was a matter of the hard drive filling up with swap files for virtual memory. You'll be able to find out if this happens again by going to the Terminal and typing ls -lah /var/vm

It's very common for there to be several such swap files and for each successive one to be double the size of the previous one. I just rebooted my iMac (10.4.2 update just came out), and I'm starting off with a 64M swap file. My PowerBook's been up for 13 days and has a gig's worth of swap files. Image editing applications and lots of web browsing are really good ways of taxing the virtual memory system, and when the system creates a new, really large swap file, your Mac will hang for an annoying while.

Finally, I believe I have seen cases where after a reboot, the system doesn't erase the old swap files. If in the results of the Terminal command I mentioned above, some of the swapfile files have time stamps from before your last reboot, that's almost certainly where the remainder of your space is. I'm guessing pretty much any of the linked applications will let you delete them. (If the swap files are from before your last reboot, it should be safe to do so.)
posted by kimota at 10:42 AM on July 13, 2005

And make sure you're not using Filevault; it will eat space like nobody's business, and eventually your disk usage will be so enormous you won't even be able to turn it off!
posted by luriete at 11:49 AM on July 13, 2005