Lost disk space

Hi, I've just noticed that the hard drive on my iMac has lost hundreds of GB of space in a few days.
I used "WhatSize" to find out there is 336 GB in a file called xxxxiDisk.sparsebundle/bands which is in the Library of my Home folder.
How do I get this space back? Because its in the iDisk will I lose the contents there?
Appreciate help. Thanks

The first thing you need to do is backup your data as my FAQ* explains someplace separate from the iDisk:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
Once you do, post in the .Mac Sync forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=957
As someone there would be more able to tell you how to turn it off without losing data.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Similar Messages

Lost disk space after each reinstall.

I've had to reinstall leopard on my macbook three times in the last week for different reasons. After each reinstall(erase and install) it appeared that I lost a little more GB to the HDD. I have a 250GB HDD, and I know it actualls reads as 232.87, but without uploading any media and only using the reinstall disks that came with the box, I have only 218 or so GB. Is this normal? I can't find the numbers anywhere; they just don't add up.

Anthony Turtzo wrote:
I can't find the numbers anywhere; they just don't add up.
My guess is that you have added up the sizes of the folders visible in Finder at the root level of the drive (Applications, Library, System, & Users) & compared that total to the total space used on the drive. The two numbers will not match because there are also hidden files & folders at the root level of the drive that Finder does not normally show. The hidden items are necessary for the proper operation of the Mac & in normal use are managed by the system. Since users should not tamper with them directly without good reason & it requires expert knowledge to do so without breaking anything, they have been made invisible in the Finder view.
It is normal for the drive space used by these items to fluctuate, & for the total to grow somewhat after first installing the OS. Some of the items contain temporary files that are created & destroyed as needed. Some contain usage, crash, & other informational logs that are managed by routines that the system automatically runs periodically to keep their total from becoming too large. Others contain initialization data gathered over time that the system uses to start up or to run processes efficiently.
Thus, there is no fixed correct number for their total size since that depends on the history & current state of the machine. On my iMac G5, one large hidden folder ("var") currently uses about 1.05 GB of drive space, but consider that only a ballpark number since it may be considerably different on different Macs at different times.
If you are still concerned about the health of the drive, especially that something is eating up disk space unnecessarily, then run Disk Utility to check it. In the "First Aid" tab select your drive & click the "Verify Disk" button. If this reports no problems then you can be pretty sure there is nothing to worry about.

Disk Utility lost disk space after cancelling partition resizing

Hi,
I accidentally cancelled the process of creating new partition (by shrinking old).
Now I have 50 GB of disk space lost.
How can I fix it?
Thanks.

Yeah, I found the solution of the space problem caused by same reason here:
Disk Utility quit. Missing HD space!
Nothing happened. So probably will have to reinstall it.

Lost disk space after Avast anti-virus scan

I used the free Avast anti-virus software to scan my MacBook Air running Mavericks and after the scan about 30 GB of disk space seems to have vanished according to software like Freespace but not according to the Finder's "Get Info" function. Where is it? How can I get it back?

In anticipation that most of the responses here would be to uninstall Avast, I did that and it did not solve the problem.
So I ask again: Does anyone have a solution that is actually a solution.
I am not interested in yet another lecture on how Macs don't have viruses etc etc. Whether or not they do now, there is no real reason they can't should some teenager in Russia take on the challenge of writing such viruses. Also, I use Parallels to run some essential Windows applications and I'm sure I will pick up viruses that way. I have the Windows version of Avast installed in the virtual machine and so far no problems with it--and that I'm keeping unless someone has a better idea for free Windows anti-viral software.
I am a long-time Mac user and I've heard it all, so spare me. Just advise if you have a specific solution to the problem I've got.

Lost Disk space after Reinstalling Leopard

I upgraded my Mac OS v.10.4.9 to Leopard v.10.5.1 in May and after Leopard was installed I had about 13 GB HD space left. It was lightning quick too. The new OS was v.10.5.1
Since then I've been downloading regular Security updates as they were prompted until the OS reached v.10.5.5 but the whole thing was gradually getting slower too so I figured I would reinstall Leopard and take it back to v.10.5.1 to see if it was back to the high speed it had when I originally installed Leopard v.10.5.1.
After I re-installed Leopard last week and it was back to v.10.5.1 it went back to running superfast again, but yesterday I started getting a notice that said I was running low on Startup disk space and I needed to delete some stuff to gain space.
When I checked available space I have less than 1 GB, about 300MB.
It seems that by re-installing Leopard it has been written adjacent to the 10.5.5 instead of on top of it, which I thought it would do automatically.
I found a file named 'Previous systems' on the HD and deleted that but it screwed it up so I had to restore that and now it's back to normal but I've still got less than 1 GB disk space.
Can anyone tell me how to delete my old operating systems (both the 10.5.5 and the 10.4.9 that I presume is still on there, which I originally upgraded to Leopard.)
I'm a conservative user of disk space and I deleted all my photos and only gained about 20 MB of new space so I'm pretty sure the problem is the OS's are written adjacent to each other instead of on top of each other.

Barry,
Thank you for your help.
When I deleted the Previous Systems file it was about 7 months after the Leopard installation.
You are right, I did do an Archive and Install in order to maintain all my info from v10.4.9.
The problem I encountered after I deleted the Previous Systems file was I then did a Secure Empty Trash and as it was emptying it was showing over 200,000 items and still upticking and that worried me that I had done the wrong thing by deleting the Previous Systems file.
So I stopped the Emptying process, and did a restart, thinking my HD space may be restored if the file was indeed possible to be deleted.
When it restarted that time, instead of the usual boot up process, there was a small flashing square box in the centre of a grey background, the small box had a blue earth in it and that went on flashing for maybe 20 minutes.
It eventually booted up and so I went to the trash, where the now presumably slightly diminished Previous Systems file was, and I dragged that file back into the HD and re-started the machine.
The world sign again flashed on, but this time for maybe only 10 minutes before it booted OK.
I checked and I was back to v.10.5.1 bit still with only about 300MB Disk space.
That's when I deleted all my photos but that only gave me about 20MB so now I'm up to about 320 MB - but as you say that is nowhere near enough.
But I do notice a definite increase in speed using 10.5.1 compared to 10.5.5. Those Security Updates have dragged it down badly.
Now that you have explained that the Previous Systems file may be safely deleted then I will try that again and let it run its course this time.
I'll let you know what happens.
Thanks again,
ann

Issues with lost disk space in Lion

Hello everybody,
I just bought a Sandisk 16gb usb stick and installed the Lion operating system on it, worked fine initially but after about 3 hours error message appeared telling me there is no more disk space. I know there is this is the problem.
The same thing happened earlier when Lion was installed on the main harddrive so i decided to reinstall Snow Leopard instead.
Does anyone know how to solve this one?
Thanks in advance

No idiot, this isn't a usual issue and without evoking hidden files would probably have never found it.
Yes, you can safely delete the sleepimage file. It should only save what you have in memory at the time your Mac sleeps but must have gotten corrupted at some point. Your Mac will create a new sleepimage file, which hopefully will not behave the same way.
EDIT: Found this also...
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_remove_diskhogging_sleepimage_file_you r_mac

Lost disk space - how do I recover it?

Let's do the math:
My iMac's hard drive ends up being around 605gb.
With Snow Leopard, and all my documents, the free HD space has been around 500gb.
With XP installed on a partition, the free HD space is 465gb in total. That seems about right.
Recently, however, I've noticed that my free HD space is close to 260gb. That means that nearly 200gb is unaccounted for, and I'm trying to track down the problem. I've cleaned cache, rebooted, and cleared the log files.
Are there any good ways to figure out where the disk space has gone - and how to get it back?
Thanks!

Using your instructions, Terminal yielded these results. My user name is replaced here with (username).
Last login: Sat Feb 6 14:36:16 on ttys000
adsl-71-141-123-132:~ (username)$ ls -Al /Volumes/
total 8
*lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Feb 6 13:51 DISK -> /*
d--x--x--x+ 9 root admin 306 Feb 5 11:02 G-DRIVE
adsl-71-141-123-132:~ (username)$
The DISK entry is for my computer, and the G-Drive for my backup disk. But since the former was not appended with a "d", I don't detect an error - or at least, Terminal doesn't.
I deleted the XP partition from my HD just in case, but still end up with these results:
Capacity: 639GB
Used: 342.81GB
Available: 296.98GB
I should have about 460GB available, by my latest count.

Somewhere is lost disk space

I used several disk programs to find out where is lost the free space. I used i Disk Inventory X to find out. But somerthing wierd is going on.
The App sais that i have used 248GB on my 499GB Harddrive. Also i have 60G of free space according to Disk Utiliy.
Image 1 : http://s.infira.ee/VDaEq.png
Image 2 : http://s.infira.ee/4IbKj.png
Also trash is empty, iPhoto Trash is empty, and so on.
But where is rest of 191GB
Can somebody help he with that

   Re-index Macintosh HD.
   Spotlight reindexing will take a while to finish.
   System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
   If you don’t have Macintosh HD icon on the Desktop:
   Finder > Preferences > Sidebar
   Enable Hard disks under “Devices”.
      About “Other”:
   http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202867

Lost disk space - FRUSTRATING

iBook crashed one afternoon and all my setting were wiped (dock settings, folder settings, etc) but none of my files were deleted only its seems that the hard drive shrunk! it went from about 9-10 GB to 3-4 GB! And I do use that encrypting softball also.

You can get a donation/freeware by the name of What Size which could
show you how big every set of files are, and where they are; so you may
track down that seems extraordinary. Be careful if you use this, since it
will allow you to remove important as well as inconsequential things in
the computer's system and elsewhere in the computer's hard drive.
If for some reason part of the hard drive is no longer readable by the
system, it may also show lost capacity or free space; a disk utility
may help fix it. If really bad, the Apple Disk Utility may say it can't.
You could try using the computer's disk utility (boot disc version) found
beneath the installer, to repair the hard drive. If you have an anti-virus
application running in your computer, perhaps it's causing a problem.
There had been a phenomena known as "space grabbing file" or some
such thing, and behind it, in cases where it exists, was Norton AV.
If you can find the cause of this problem (perhaps previous system
folder from earlier archive and install exists, and other copies or installer
parts are on the drive; these could go if not needed) you may not need
to consider more radical, maybe better, means toward a cure. A clone.
There could well be some other cause for this problem; and ultimately
you may have to archive your work off the computer and use the OS
booted disk utility on the system install disc to completely erase and
reformat the hard disk drive; perhaps even use the options in there to
zero data on the drive to try and reclaim all space, then reformat and
reinstall an all new OSX from scratch. -- This is the complete way. If
you have access to an externally enclosed Firewire hard disk drive,
the best idea is to get the drive ready to hold a whole computer drive
clone then use Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner (latter runs free as
donationware) to put a complete clone/copy on there; then you could
use the computer's boot installer's Disk Utility to erase/zero/reformat
the machine's hard disk drive; and use a clone utility to move the system
back. If you have dual systems or parts of older installations in the HDD,
you would also get them in your complete computer drive clone; so this
is something to be aware of, and deal with either before or after a clone
is made. Being able to remove and move back a good system and parts
is a time saver; since you can doctor the hard drive & move it back in.
If you need to go this far to get truly past this issue, you would end up
with more experience than most casual users have; and could do backup
and restores of your entire computer on to a large external Firewire drive.
If such a drive is partitioned, more than one system copy could exist in it.
You could also run disk utilities and other things from the external, rather
than from the computer's internal drive. - There are advantages in this.

Lost disk space after formatting drive

Hi folks,
about 2 months ago I bought an 320GB IDE drive for my win machine. Recently I decided to put it in an old FW case to use it for TimeMachine. The external case always did an excellent job so far. When mounting the drive, I could see it was 320GB. I reformatted the space to OS X journaled and now it is showing up as being 128GB. Reformatting with GUID or MBR, just to check if that could be the problem didn't bring me the lost space back.
Any ideas?

Mailman42 wrote:
Some external cases have a size limitation on them. The chipsets inside.
nerowolfe replied:
I thought that was only with Winders FAT32 stuff.
If that is the case, it may be possible to partition the drive into 2 pieces, each below the max.
I believe that in some cases (pun intended!) the limitation is that the older chipset does not have enough bits allocated in its silicon to address the greater capacity of larger drives. If so, partitioning or the file system installed won't matter -- it still won't be able to access any part of the drive at the higher addresses.
In this respect, it is much like the 32 bit address limit of FAT32, except it is in hardware instead of in the file system specification.

Lost disk space after Boot Camp partion crash

I was partitioning my 160GB (I have about 70GB free space) with the Boot Camp assistant, when my computer kernel panicked. I had to restart, and when I logged in again I was missing about 10GB of space. I did an "Erase Free Space" w/ Disk Utility, but to no avail. Anyone know how to fix this?
Thanks in advance.

Also note, that you can partition your HD with Disk-Utility running off the Install Disk to create a FAT partition for bootcamp. The next time you run Bootcamp it will allow you to use that partition to install WIndows.
I went through 3 Kernel Panics, trying to create the FAT Partition with the boot camp asssistant, always having to fix the HD with the method above.

Cancelled ARD Copy Caused Lost Disk Space

Hello,
I was using ARD 3.1 to copy a 6 GB file from a workstation to my computer. About 2/3 the way through, I realized that I didn't have enough free space on my drive so I cancelled the copy.
It appears that my drive now has 5GB less free space than before I started the copy job.
Does anybody know how to reclaim this lost space?
Various Mac OS X (10.4.8)

I had the same problem. You can find the lost space here:
/Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop/Client/Tasks
you can run the following command to free the space:
rm -rf /Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop/Client/Tasks

Trimming Movies = Lost Disk Space?

Hi Guys,
I'm using FCE4. I've captured a bunch of clips from old 8mm tapes and have them in a bin in FCE. I right click on them, choose "open in editor" to get them in a quicktime window. Then I trim the clip to just the portion I want to keep and choose "Trim to Selection." Quicktime lops off the beginning and end and bam - I've got only the video I want.
If I open the movie inspector within quicktime, it shows me that the newly trimmed video is taking up less space than it used to. However, if I look at the video file in the finder, the finder shows that the video is still taking up the same amount of space as it did before I trimmed it.
This is a problem, because I have hundreds of videos to trim and the wasted space is going to add up. What am I doing wrong? Thanks!
-Bryan Jones

After you trim it try doing a Save As. You might also try this question on the QuickTime forum, where there are people you work with that application.

Unrecoverable disk space loss after failure in scanning

I am using a Mac Mini with HP C410a for scanning. The OSX verion is 10.7.1. Because HP has not provided the special driver for lion, I have to rely on the Scan function of OSX. The scanning process usually consumes huge volume of disk space. For A4 document in color 600 dpi, it uses nearly 1G for 1 page. I have only 30G of free space, usually I can only scan about 25 pages. At the end, there may be only several G left. I need to reboot the system again to recover the disk space. However, frequently there is error in scanning, even I reboot the machine again, I cannot recover the disk space. Currently I have only 6G free space in my hard disk. I have tried several cache deletion programs but they all fail to recover the lost disk space.
I have phoned the local Apple support but they failed to give me advice.

There is no legitimate way to downgrade an iOS version.
The "other" category is not the firmware/iOS. The firmware/iOS is the majority of the difference between the 32 and 29.1 (or 28.3) GB The other part of the difference is due to how GBs are advertized and used by the iOS. See:
How Mac OS X and iOS report storage capacity
The "other" category is normally less than 0.25 GB but can grow with corrupt files and things that really did not get deleted. To reduce the size of the "other". a restore from backup sometimes works but sometimes a restore to factory defaults/new iPod is required.

Relocated original files to desktop (on low disk space) and lost photos?

Help! My wife and I exchanged our vows on the Napali Coast and we lost our photos...
2006 Macbook, iphoto06:
As I was importing our 200 photos from the hike, my computer warned me that I was running out of disk space and stopped before finishing the load. I regretfully opted to delete the photos from the camera as it imported (bummer). The photos were safe in my iphoto library when I returned the following day and cleared some disk space on my hard drive. I then imported the remaining photos and everything looked normal.
Here's where it gets weird. So I was looking at a photo and accidently deleted it from the iphoto library. I located the original file and reimported it, however the computer told me that I already had the photo in the library. I looked into help and followed the instructions to drag the rolls onto my desktop and reimport them into iphoto. I did this and consequently lost some 50 very special photos. Now the iphoto library had this giant gap filled with grey !!!'s where the photos were. I looked into the original rolls folders and found a number of the original files were now missing? Something obviously happened from me having moved the files from the originals folder to the desktop. When I returned to iphoto, I recieved a warning that I was running out of diskspace again and some of the recent changes may have been lost!
I have searched for the files according to their file numbers (from the missing thumbnail) and the files are not coming up on my search. The original files are not in the trash either?
My questions:
1. Is there any way to trace the history of my actions and undo my actions or salvage my files?
2. The images still appear in my iphoto library thumbnails when scrolling down the screen (briefly before turning to grey !'s). Can I somehow salvage the image from the thumbnails?
3. Do I have to find the original files to see the photos again?
I have learned to not mess with orignial files in iphoto, never delete when importng, and always have mucho diskspace when uploading.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Will and Julia in Kauai

As I was importing our 200 photos from the hike, my computer warned me that I was running out of disk space and stopped before finishing the load.
You should always have a minimum of 10 GB of free space on your boot hard drive for safe and proper operation of your computer. you must get at least that much free space to go forward
I regretfully opted to delete the photos from the camera as it imported (bummer).
It is recommended that you never have iPhoto delete your photos - wait until they are imported and tested (I wait for a backup cycle or two myself) and then use the camera to format the memory card - this will save you from many problems and reformats you card with every use which eliminates other issues
The photos were safe in my iphoto library when I returned the following day and cleared some disk space on my hard drive. I then imported the remaining photos and everything looked normal.
Here's where it gets weird. So I was looking at a photo and accidently deleted it from the iphoto library.
How did you do this? using iPhoto or using the finder?
I located the original file and reimported it, however the computer told me that I already had the photo in the library. I looked into help and followed the instructions to drag the rolls onto my desktop and reimport them into iphoto. I did this and consequently lost some 50 very special photos. Now the iphoto library had this giant gap filled with grey !!!'s where the photos were. I looked into the original rolls folders and found a number of the original files were now missing? Something obviously happened from me having moved the files from the originals folder to the desktop. When I returned to iphoto, I recieved a warning that I was running out of diskspace again and some of the recent changes may have been lost!
Again until you have a minimum of 10BG of free space you are risking many additional problems with your total system including iPhoto
I have searched for the files according to their file numbers (from the missing thumbnail) and the files are not coming up on my search. The original files are not in the trash either?
My questions:
1. Is there any way to trace the history of my actions and undo my actions or salvage my files?
No - but you may be able to recover the photos on your camera card using program like media recover - http://www.mediarecover.com/ - the trial version will tell you what is available for recovery
2. The images still appear in my iphoto library thumbnails when scrolling down the screen (briefly before turning to grey !'s). Can I somehow salvage the image from the thumbnails?
no
3. Do I have to find the original files to see the photos again?
Yes - either on your computer or on your camera media card
I have learned to not mess with orignial files in iphoto,
Yes - that is critical - doing so is likely to lose data and possibly photos
never delete when importng,
That is strongly recommended
and always have mucho diskspace when uploading.
Yes - 10GB minimum
LN

Lost disk space

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