10 GB of "ghost" files on my hard drive
I have a 30 GB Hard disk on my Powerbook. A few weeks ago I suddenly realized that there is only 500 MB of free space, which is pretty much impossible for me to do. When I get info on everything at the root level of the disk, it adds up to 17.5 GB of files on the disk. When I get info on the drive icon it says about 27.5 GB are used.
Could someone suggest how to find the invisible 10 GB of stuff? I'm the only user of the computer, and I use it for typical college student stuff. I do a very limited amout of audio recording and editing which might produce scrap files. The program I use for audio is the shareware Amadeus, and I really only use it occasionally to record myself playing my horn.
Thanks in advance and happy new year!!
Could someone suggest how to find the invisible 10 GB of stuff? I'm the only user of the computer, and I use it for typical college student stuff. I do a very limited amout of audio recording and editing which might produce scrap files. The program I use for audio is the shareware Amadeus, and I really only use it occasionally to record myself playing my horn.
Thanks in advance and happy new year!!
Comments
Enter in /var/vm/ and press Go.
I bet you'll find your missing 10GB...
That's the directory where the swap files for your virtual memory are stored. They can get quite big between reboots. Try rebooting, then checking the used disk space again, as well as looking in that folder. Better?
Karl' suggestion of ODS is also a good one for finding out where the &*$(@# your disk space went, but that 'missing' space is generally swap files, since the Finder ignores anything in the hidden Unixy underbelly.
Thanks to anyone else who has suggestions!
You may know that every night, Mac OS X runs periodic maintenance tasks to get rid of unused logs and cache files. It also backs up some UNIX files.
However, these maintenance tasks were programmed to run at night, at 3, 4, or 5 AM, depending on what they do. That is, unless your computer is turned off or asleep.
The good news is that not running these tasks is more than very unlikely to cause instability. However, running them may free some of your disk space and make logs easier to read over the time.
To perform them on Jaguar or Panther, open your Terminal and type :
sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly
Press return between each line, and wait until the first command has completed to start the second one."
do you think this might work? taken from http://www.macdevcenter.com/lpt/a/4400
I once had the same problem and after trying everything I realized that the problem was firewire target disk mode. I had trashed some files from my iBook hard drive while I had it connected to my iMac. I never emptied the trash (forgot to do it) and later disconnected the firewire disk (iBook) from my iMac.
After a few days I wondered where all the free space had gone from my iBook. I counted that I had about 7-8GB of data on the disk and still only 1GB free space (on a 15GB drive). Well I accidently figured it out the next time I used the iBook as a firewire disk. The data I thought I had trashed was still in the trash. After emptying the trash in target disk mode I got my lost free space on the iBook back.
The only other way I know for temporarily "loosing" disk space is to use iDVD and have it save the encoded video in the project file after quitting. That can easily grab 10GB for only 2-3 project files.
-Snowster