Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with diskspace

Something is eating up my disk space as I watch. What should I do?

Gor-ella — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:03:48 -0800

Something is eating up my disk space as I watch. What should I do? (somewhat urgent) I'm not by any means a computer expert, please keep this in mind in your responses.
I have a 60 GB Acer Laptop running Vista. In the last hour my free space has gone from >2 Gb to 1.37GB. I haven't done anything during this time except browse the internet. I have already received a warning about low disk space. This scares me because that's what computers say before they die. Being concerned, I started scanning my computer for viruses. I use AVG Anti-Virus Free. Is there anything else I can/should do?

[iTunesFilter] Want to fill 160 Gb iPod, but only has tiny teensy hard-drive

XiBe — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:01:17 -0800

How to handle a 160 Gb iPod when the computer only has 30 free Gb? My girlfriend asked for a 160 Gb iPod for her birthday, and I offered her. She wanted a bug iPod because she wanted to have all of her music in there - her older 4 Gb iPod Nano wasn't enough, she constantly had to renew its content.

Thing is, she handles iTunes and therefore her music from her old laptop, where she just doesn't have the disk space to fill up her new iPod. The issue here would be that iTunes requires that you have all your music in it, before you can put in the iPod - and that you then keep the music in iTunes. Given her drive space, she just can't do this.

She does have an external drive, and I advised her to put all of her music in there, and let iTunes handle her music from there, but she doesn't really want to carry around her ex-drive when on vacation, for instance.

Does anyone around you had to deal with this kind of situation? Any advice could be pretty useful...

Thanks a lot.

Where's my disk space?

dangerousdan — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:59:25 -0800

My Dell XPS M1710 required a complete windows re-install (XP SP2 Media Centre). All went swimmingly (if not labouriously) until I went to re-install other programs. My 110Gb hard disk now only has 2 Gb free. Where are the the other 95Gb and how do I get access to it? I only have one partition on this drive.
Looking at file list (including both hidden and system files), I can only account for about 20 Gb.

The file list is:
Dell - 270 Mb
Documents and Settings - 1.73 Gb
Program Files - 8.5 Gb
RECYCLER - 0
WINDOWS - 3.86 Gb
Pagefile.sys - 1.57 Gb

Drive distopia

gavia — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:27:12 -0800

Vista disk space filter: What's eating 190 GB on my computer? So, my C drive is 229 GB. Windows Vista tells me I have 5-ish GB free (screengrab). When I run a program to see how I'm using the disk space (WinDirStat), it appears as though I'm only using 33 GB (screengrab). Any ideas what is going on here?

Junk songs wasting space

riffola — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:41:00 -0800

I have too many junk songs as a part of a compilation or a soundtrack or an album with a couple of good songs. On one hand I dont wanna break up the album, on the other, I don't want to waste space. What should I do? What do you do?

Laptop DiskSpace issues

blackkar — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 05:41:19 -0800

I have an older (3+ yrs) Dell Inspiron laptop that is running out of disk space (due to music files, tax and bookkeeping software programs). Would I be better off purchasing an external device to shift the music to or should I take it in and have a professional insert more memory? If external, do you have any recommendations? I don't want to drop more than $250 on this, if possible.

Where is my free disk space hiding?

zorro astor — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 04:13:48 -0800

What happened to my disk space? I have a 120 gig hard drive. I have about 15 gigs of free space left. I have a sum total of about 17 gigs of data and programs loaded onto it. I vaguely recall starting out at about 20 gigs on my last clean install. That leaves 60+gigs unaccounted for. Where the hell is it?

You can never be too rich, too thin or have too much disk space...

AmbroseChapel — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:30:23 -0800

You can never be too rich, too thin or have too much disk space... I'm using a dual-G4 desktop (Panther) with a 28GB hard disk.

You won't be surprised to hear that I'm running out of space.

So I got a chance to improve the situation when another mac gave up the ghost completely. I cannibalised two 9GB SCSI drives from it, installed them, and I've got another 18GB ... what should I do with it?

Obviously I should put files on it, but, which ones.? I'm pretty much used to the OS X "Documents", "Applications", "Library" etc setup. Should I just use one of the disks as my Documents folder?

I'd put my iTunes Music folder on one, but that folder's already over 10GB and climbing. And it probably wouldn't be sensible to put Applications or Library on it.

My problem is of course that I haven't got an extra 18GB, I've got an extra disk of 9GB and another extra disk of 9GB. Combine the two into a RAID maybe? Fiddle with mounting options so that one of the disks appears to be /Applications when it's really not? Do something truly scary and try to combine all three physical disks somehow?

Supplementary question -- this is all reminding me of the OS 9 days when people used to have their pet schemes for partitioned/multiple disks. People would have the OS on one, apps on another and documents on a third or whatever. Does that kind of thing make any sense in the era of OS X?

Monitoring disk usage on a BSD box

blag — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 08:00:54 -0800

Is there something like Spacemonger for FreeBSD? I use Spacemonger all the time to keep an eye on my Windows disk usage and weed out huge temp/log files etc. I also have root on a command-line FreeBSD box and I'm fed up with using du drilldowns to work out where all my space has gone. Is there something similar to spacemonger which I could use? I'm open to any suggestions: command line, web-interface, local (Windows) installation... Thanks.