I have the same issue. I opened up Mail and deleted the Gmail account in there. My available capacity instantly jumped from 0 to 12GB. The Disk Analyzer had shows 256GB of Other. Now it shows a more typical usage breakout. Thanks guys!
Thanks! Yes, it is gmail. How did you solve the problem?
I have the same problem, the gmail account has three folders - all mail, important, sent mail. I actually deleted all the sent mail this after and it is "growing" back - it is download or maybe also making copies of the emails. It is driving me nuts!
Can we just delete the gmail account? will mail still work if we delete the gmail account in there?
I am experiencing somewhat similar problems with my macbookpro as described by nshady.
I am very interested in knowing if anything has surfaced on this matter, because it seems to be hard to find good info about this? Maybe some other threads discussing the same issue?
Now I have just purchased a new harddrive and am about to do a clean install of everything, hoping that will help, but maybe from what I have understood by reading this thread, this is not the answer. The only thing new I will try is to (obvoustly) remove 5-year old dust off the logic board when installing the new disc
Listen, I had a similar occurrence with my 2011 iMac 21.5 inch model, I kept losing 20 gb a day, I started out having 300 gb available, and when I would re login, it would lower by another r 20, finally on april 13th, It was down to 19.5gb, I put all my important non app store software in my copy drive, www.copy.com and erased the current installation of os x, and restored from factory defaults. It took all of 2 hours. Yes, you do have to erase your old copy to go completely back to factory settings.
Hi I am experiencing the same problem - over the last 36 hours my mac has been running very slowly and stopping due to lack of memory - equally yesterday my g mail account stopped bringing in any e mails and the wheel is continuing to spin (my g mail account works via the web from my Mac and also via my iphone) but no e mails are coming in through the normal mail route.
I have been clearing out substantial number of files via trash can and emptying it - but each time I release many giga bytes the memory drops for a few minutes ... but then builds back up so I have no memory again....so I am now wondering - as noted on this site - is it my g mail account that is causing this problem - any advice gratefully received - has anyone found a solution to this ... please??
I found your thread useful in trouble shooting my own problem in this regard. I have a similar vintage Mac Book Pro (2008) running OS 10.7.5, and one day I watched in horror as 24 GB of hard disk free space disappeared in about 10 minutes. I found GrandPerspecitve helpful and saw that two hugh .temp files were eating up my disk space. In my case, and this may occur with any program that creates temp files, it was Carbonite program backing up the 28 GB vmware Fusion file on my fusion disk partition and writing temp files to the HD ins the process. Several calls to Cabornite tech support (who by the way were the most knowledgeable and helpful tech folks I have ever worked with) and we identified what was going on, disabled backing up the 28 GB vmware file and things seem stable for the moment. I believe that other back up programs (Time Capsule perhaps) could do the same thing perhaps, by writing a large .temp file to the HD.
By the way I found Grand Perspective invaluable in trouble shooting this. Too bad there isn't some sort of manual to explain all the capabilities of this utility as I feel like I have just scratched the surface of its capabilities.
I have exactly the same issue and have completely stumped an apple senior adviser tonight with this issue. The GB literally disappear before my eyes and I get warnings that HD space is running low, then finally that the startup disk is full. When I restart, I have 17-20 GB free, then it disappears again. I ran a terminal command tonight to show hidden files in finder, but there is nothing that is out of the ordinary. I am currently trying to re-index the disk, but it is eating up drive space just doing this, and stopped working on the first attempt due to lack of drive space. (It warned me the drive was full, but when I began, there was 20GB free! I restarted and had 18GB free, but it's now down to about 11GB and there is still 30 min left to index. I fear it'll happen again.) What were the workarounds for this? I am ready to erase and reinstall the OS and then add items back one at a time.
Same issue running a flash drive, happened to ntice my drive had gone from 160 gigs to 42 gigs and dropping. Checked activity monitor and was showing two instances of Unrar app running, and they showed they had been active for over 8 hours straight. I had had to force quit the apps when they hung up opening a file. So clearly something in Mavericks is causing some of these apps to not fully quit. Hopefully mine was an isolated event. Just going to restart my machine now.
Even after I restarted the space did not recover on its own. The loss persisted so had to dig around and find it.actually ended up being Ez7 zip app, it was creating a tempLog.txt file 121.06 gigs in size!
I would just write a small shell script the deletes any .tmp file larger then 1GB upon boot up. If you give me the name of the directories where these files reside I'll be more then happy to write the script for you guys.
I solved this problem by reinstalling Mac OS X without removing any definitions, simply reinstalling the OS. However, after it was a done I noticed a change in the Finder view options: Finder was no longer generating preview icons for every folder in my disk. I believe this was the problem. Choosing some folder and opening it in Finder, then going to 'View' -> 'Show View Options' there's an option called 'Show icon preview' and a button 'Use as Defaults'. I used 'Show icon preview' as a default option which was reset by the reinstallation.
Perhaps you did the same. Try to disable that option as a default and turn it on only on selected folders where you find it useful. Perhaps it solves the problem without requiring the reinstallation.
As a temporary solution, I suggest killing the Spotlight process completely. I achieved this by running the following command in terminal:
The problem was a nightmare. I have a 500GB SSD with about 80GB free which would fill up in 30min~60min before rendering the computer completely useless freezing the entire system. The space would return after restart only to be filled again. I knew it couldn't be the indexing problem many people have because it would happen mainly AFTER Spotlight completed file indexing (which is rather fast in a SSD). The problem was also rather random. It would eventually happen, but I sometimes used the computer for about a day with no issues but most of times it would start shortly after logging in.
I solved this problem by reinstalling Mac OS X without removing any definitions, simply reinstalling the OS. However, after it was a done I noticed a change in the Finder view options: Finder was no longer generating preview icons for every folder in my disk. I believe this was the problem. Choosing some folder and opening it in Finder, then going to 'View' -> 'Show View Options' there's an option called 'Show icon preview' and a button 'Use as Defaults'. I used 'Show icon preview' as a default option which was reset by the reinstallation.
Perhaps you did the same. Try to disable that option as a default and turn it on only on selected folders where you find it useful. Perhaps it solves the problem without requiring the reinstallation.
As a temporary solution, I suggest killing the Spotlight process completely. I achieved this by running the following command in terminal:
The problem was a nightmare. I have a 500GB SSD with about 80GB free which would fill up in 30min~60min before rendering the computer completely useless freezing the entire system. The space would return after restart only to be filled again. I knew it couldn't be the indexing problem many people have because it would happen mainly AFTER Spotlight completed file indexing (which is rather fast in a SSD). The problem was also rather random. It would eventually happen, but I sometimes used the computer for about a day with no issues but most of times it would start shortly after logging in.
I've noticed that running Netflix, Pandora or even Facebook (with videos) seems to trigger the disk being filled. If I reboot and don't visit Pandora, for example, I'm good for a long time.
I've had the same or similar problem. My hard drive failed and I had a new one installed by Apple. My machine is an older iMac so my original was 320 GB and replaced with a 1TB drive. They also upgraded to Maverics.
After restoring from my time machine backup, it seemed slow. I ended up checking the disk space to find only about 30 GBs left free. I took it to the genius bar only to find they aren't. They accused me of putting more movie files on the disk and recommended I reimage and start over. I noticed that a new iMovie library was created and that the elements and project folders combined were about the same size as the new iMovie library file. After that, they looked up some cases and found that iMovie creates a new library and leaves the old folders around. This accounted for about 360Gigs of space. They told me I could simply delete them. I backed them up on an external drive first and then deleted them.
After deleting them, I should have reclaimed the 360Gigs but I only reclaimed a very small amount of GBs. My disk was still almost full and performance was still very slow. I've been working with Apple telephone support for days and going around in circles. We wiped the drive, reinstalled Maverics and restored from my backup. The disk is still basically full. The odd thing is that the movie folder is showing the right about of space, about half what it was before I deleted the folders. However, at the hard drive level, the space is not freed. Also, when I first restored, most of the space was in 'other' file types. After letting the machine sit for about a day and rechecking, the the missing space seems to have moved from 'other' file types to movie file types. Then when watching the hard drive info, I noticed that I was losing space, which leads me to this topic/problem. I've used disk inventory x to try to find the runaway file(s) but can't. I have my suspicions about a virus or other memory leak creating a hidden file somewhere at the system level.
I'm still working with Apple support. I'll post if we find anything.
In addition to Spotlight, there is a problem with Apple Mail and gmail iMap messages.
If you have a large gmail account, Mail will load some but not all files into its cache As more space becomes available, Mail will progressively add more mail files until it fills the disk.
Solutions:
You: Remove the large email account or clean it up by deleting large messages or placing them in special folders. This is in addition to the advice for resetting your Spotlight search as correctly stated in prior messages.
Apple: Apple should provide "Advanced" mail control options so users can decide which mail folders should be loaded and also should be configurable to limit the size of the mail folders. So old messages would roll off as new ones came in when you reach the size limit (FIFO).
Apple should have a team of experts outside of the genius bars that investigates these kinds of problems?
Had the same happening on a 2008 iMac running 10.9. All fine until about a week ago when suddenly filling up at about 1MB per minute (sic), and so eventually locks up completely - can't start even in safe mode. Tried showing hidden files but nothing visible - HD should have had almost 400GB free. Eventually found it using Disk Warrior - a 379GB (sic) file called System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresynbolicationd. That file is hidden-hidden. Didn't show in OmniDiskScanner or even when 'show hidden files' set via Terminal. Eventually deleted it using another Mac and my own as a target with FireWire connection (holding down T on startup). Incidentally Apple says needs to be similar OS but in this case it was one running 10.6 that came to the rescue. Was able to delete rogue file. Now installing clean 10.9. But what would add so much so fast to that file? Don't have Netflix or Gmail (see comments above).
I have exactly the same problem with my good old macBook pro 2008. It started eating disc space in front of my eyes (approx 60 gig) i had to delete stuff to get more space, but that dissapeared as well.... as i can see from the thread above, it is a correlation between this computer model and this problem. (?) I don't download much on this computer, so i'm quite sure it's not a virus. For me this problem started when I was using iphoto, and as i can see using Grand Perspective it is exactly where all my disc space has gone. Now i just need to figure out why, cause it shouldn't...!
I really reccomed grand perspective to start solving this problem!
Comments
I have the same issue. I opened up Mail and deleted the Gmail account in there. My available capacity instantly jumped from 0 to 12GB. The Disk Analyzer had shows 256GB of Other. Now it shows a more typical usage breakout. Thanks guys!
charlituna,
Thanks! Yes, it is gmail. How did you solve the problem?
I have the same problem, the gmail account has three folders - all mail, important, sent mail. I actually deleted all the sent mail this after and it is "growing" back - it is download or maybe also making copies of the emails. It is driving me nuts!
Can we just delete the gmail account? will mail still work if we delete the gmail account in there?
Thanks
Hi!
I am experiencing somewhat similar problems with my macbookpro as described by nshady.
I am very interested in knowing if anything has surfaced on this matter, because it seems to be hard to find good info about this? Maybe some other threads discussing the same issue?
Now I have just purchased a new harddrive and am about to do a clean install of everything, hoping that will help, but maybe from what I have understood by reading this thread, this is not the answer. The only thing new I will try is to (obvoustly) remove 5-year old dust off the logic board when installing the new disc
Well - here goes nothing then -
/ KJ
Listen, I had a similar occurrence with my 2011 iMac 21.5 inch model, I kept losing 20 gb a day, I started out having 300 gb available, and when I would re login, it would lower by another r 20, finally on april 13th, It was down to 19.5gb, I put all my important non app store software in my copy drive, www.copy.com and erased the current installation of os x, and restored from factory defaults. It took all of 2 hours. Yes, you do have to erase your old copy to go completely back to factory settings.
Hi I am experiencing the same problem - over the last 36 hours my mac has been running very slowly and stopping due to lack of memory - equally yesterday my g mail account stopped bringing in any e mails and the wheel is continuing to spin (my g mail account works via the web from my Mac and also via my iphone) but no e mails are coming in through the normal mail route.
I have been clearing out substantial number of files via trash can and emptying it - but each time I release many giga bytes the memory drops for a few minutes ... but then builds back up so I have no memory again....so I am now wondering - as noted on this site - is it my g mail account that is causing this problem - any advice gratefully received - has anyone found a solution to this ... please??
Dave c
I found your thread useful in trouble shooting my own problem in this regard. I have a similar vintage Mac Book Pro (2008) running OS 10.7.5, and one day I watched in horror as 24 GB of hard disk free space disappeared in about 10 minutes. I found GrandPerspecitve helpful and saw that two hugh .temp files were eating up my disk space. In my case, and this may occur with any program that creates temp files, it was Carbonite program backing up the 28 GB vmware Fusion file on my fusion disk partition and writing temp files to the HD ins the process. Several calls to Cabornite tech support (who by the way were the most knowledgeable and helpful tech folks I have ever worked with) and we identified what was going on, disabled backing up the 28 GB vmware file and things seem stable for the moment. I believe that other back up programs (Time Capsule perhaps) could do the same thing perhaps, by writing a large .temp file to the HD.
By the way I found Grand Perspective invaluable in trouble shooting this. Too bad there isn't some sort of manual to explain all the capabilities of this utility as I feel like I have just scratched the surface of its capabilities.
Thanks for everyones postings.
GSSilver Farmington, UT
I have exactly the same issue and have completely stumped an apple senior adviser tonight with this issue. The GB literally disappear before my eyes and I get warnings that HD space is running low, then finally that the startup disk is full. When I restart, I have 17-20 GB free, then it disappears again. I ran a terminal command tonight to show hidden files in finder, but there is nothing that is out of the ordinary. I am currently trying to re-index the disk, but it is eating up drive space just doing this, and stopped working on the first attempt due to lack of drive space. (It warned me the drive was full, but when I began, there was 20GB free! I restarted and had 18GB free, but it's now down to about 11GB and there is still 30 min left to index. I fear it'll happen again.) What were the workarounds for this? I am ready to erase and reinstall the OS and then add items back one at a time.
Same issue running a flash drive, happened to ntice my drive had gone from 160 gigs to 42 gigs and dropping. Checked activity monitor and was showing two instances of Unrar app running, and they showed they had been active for over 8 hours straight. I had had to force quit the apps when they hung up opening a file. So clearly something in Mavericks is causing some of these apps to not fully quit. Hopefully mine was an isolated event. Just going to restart my machine now.
Even after I restarted the space did not recover on its own. The loss persisted so had to dig around and find it.actually ended up being Ez7 zip app, it was creating a tempLog.txt file 121.06 gigs in size!
I would just write a small shell script the deletes any .tmp file larger then 1GB upon boot up. If you give me the name of the directories where these files reside I'll be more then happy to write the script for you guys.
I solved this problem by reinstalling Mac OS X without removing any definitions, simply reinstalling the OS. However, after it was a done I noticed a change in the Finder view options: Finder was no longer generating preview icons for every folder in my disk. I believe this was the problem. Choosing some folder and opening it in Finder, then going to 'View' -> 'Show View Options' there's an option called 'Show icon preview' and a button 'Use as Defaults'. I used 'Show icon preview' as a default option which was reset by the reinstallation.
Perhaps you did the same. Try to disable that option as a default and turn it on only on selected folders where you find it useful. Perhaps it solves the problem without requiring the reinstallation.
As a temporary solution, I suggest killing the Spotlight process completely. I achieved this by running the following command in terminal:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
This is not perfect since it kills every search function dependent on Spotlight such as Mail search, folder search, etc.
Everytime I needed it I activated it temporarily by running the reverse command in terminal:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
The problem was a nightmare. I have a 500GB SSD with about 80GB free which would fill up in 30min~60min before rendering the computer completely useless freezing the entire system. The space would return after restart only to be filled again. I knew it couldn't be the indexing problem many people have because it would happen mainly AFTER Spotlight completed file indexing (which is rather fast in a SSD). The problem was also rather random. It would eventually happen, but I sometimes used the computer for about a day with no issues but most of times it would start shortly after logging in.
I solved this problem by reinstalling Mac OS X without removing any definitions, simply reinstalling the OS. However, after it was a done I noticed a change in the Finder view options: Finder was no longer generating preview icons for every folder in my disk. I believe this was the problem. Choosing some folder and opening it in Finder, then going to 'View' -> 'Show View Options' there's an option called 'Show icon preview' and a button 'Use as Defaults'. I used 'Show icon preview' as a default option which was reset by the reinstallation.
Perhaps you did the same. Try to disable that option as a default and turn it on only on selected folders where you find it useful. Perhaps it solves the problem without requiring the reinstallation.
As a temporary solution, I suggest killing the Spotlight process completely. I achieved this by running the following command in terminal:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
This is not perfect since it kills every search function dependent on Spotlight such as Mail search, folder search, etc.
Everytime I needed it I activated it temporarily by running the reverse command in terminal:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
The problem was a nightmare. I have a 500GB SSD with about 80GB free which would fill up in 30min~60min before rendering the computer completely useless freezing the entire system. The space would return after restart only to be filled again. I knew it couldn't be the indexing problem many people have because it would happen mainly AFTER Spotlight completed file indexing (which is rather fast in a SSD). The problem was also rather random. It would eventually happen, but I sometimes used the computer for about a day with no issues but most of times it would start shortly after logging in.
I've noticed that running Netflix, Pandora or even Facebook (with videos) seems to trigger the disk being filled. If I reboot and don't visit Pandora, for example, I'm good for a long time.
I've had the same or similar problem. My hard drive failed and I had a new one installed by Apple. My machine is an older iMac so my original was 320 GB and replaced with a 1TB drive. They also upgraded to Maverics.
After restoring from my time machine backup, it seemed slow. I ended up checking the disk space to find only about 30 GBs left free. I took it to the genius bar only to find they aren't. They accused me of putting more movie files on the disk and recommended I reimage and start over. I noticed that a new iMovie library was created and that the elements and project folders combined were about the same size as the new iMovie library file. After that, they looked up some cases and found that iMovie creates a new library and leaves the old folders around. This accounted for about 360Gigs of space. They told me I could simply delete them. I backed them up on an external drive first and then deleted them.
After deleting them, I should have reclaimed the 360Gigs but I only reclaimed a very small amount of GBs. My disk was still almost full and performance was still very slow. I've been working with Apple telephone support for days and going around in circles. We wiped the drive, reinstalled Maverics and restored from my backup. The disk is still basically full. The odd thing is that the movie folder is showing the right about of space, about half what it was before I deleted the folders. However, at the hard drive level, the space is not freed. Also, when I first restored, most of the space was in 'other' file types. After letting the machine sit for about a day and rechecking, the the missing space seems to have moved from 'other' file types to movie file types. Then when watching the hard drive info, I noticed that I was losing space, which leads me to this topic/problem. I've used disk inventory x to try to find the runaway file(s) but can't. I have my suspicions about a virus or other memory leak creating a hidden file somewhere at the system level.
I'm still working with Apple support. I'll post if we find anything.
In addition to Spotlight, there is a problem with Apple Mail and gmail iMap messages.
If you have a large gmail account, Mail will load some but not all files into its cache As more space becomes available, Mail will progressively add more mail files until it fills the disk.
Solutions:
You: Remove the large email account or clean it up by deleting large messages or placing them in special folders. This is in addition to the advice for resetting your Spotlight search as correctly stated in prior messages.
Apple: Apple should provide "Advanced" mail control options so users can decide which mail folders should be loaded and also should be configurable to limit the size of the mail folders. So old messages would roll off as new ones came in when you reach the size limit (FIFO).
Apple should have a team of experts outside of the genius bars that investigates these kinds of problems?
I have a MacBook Pro, 2008, 250 GB hard drive. I'm running Yosemite 10.10.2
My hard drive filled up. Then I deleted 50 GB of movies and other large files. It filled up again.
After looking around I got a $10 program called Yosemite Cache Cleaner.
I ran it to do a "deep cleanse" of caches and logs. I said "yes" to all the prompts to delete these cache and log files.
That freed up 175 GB of disk space!!!
I expect that the program will keep doing it when needed, and so far there are no bad side effects. That means—problem solved.
My question is, how can THAT MUCH space be taken up with caches and logs? And taken up so fast.
I run both Safari and Chrome browsers.
Keywords
Mac hard drive fill filling up cache log fix problem OS X
as i can see from the thread above, it is a correlation between this computer model and this problem. (?) I don't download much on this computer, so i'm quite sure it's not a virus.
For me this problem started when I was using iphoto, and as i can see using Grand Perspective it is exactly where all my disc space has gone. Now i just need to figure out why, cause it shouldn't...!
I really reccomed grand perspective to start solving this problem!
Like to watch movies or play games online? Your Flash has to be always fresh: http://www.joydownload.com/how-to/upgrade-flash - this manual will help you
Hello. I have a similar problem - the file appears to 12GB
I need help in solving this problem!