Where is my hard drive space?

Ok, so heres the situation:
I purchased a new Macbook Pro with the intentions of doing a clean install on my old Macbook Pro 17",
Neither Lion nor Snow Leopard will reinstall on the old Macbook because only 159GB of space is available,
The old Macbook Pro has a 500GB hard drive,
Under "disk utilities" I see a disk image for Macintosh HD, my external HD with 500 GB then there is a solid gray line with "disk 1" and "Mac OS X Base System" under it.
Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

Rescue and Recovery is causing it. Show Hidden AND System files, and go to C:\RRbackups. There are automatic backups made by Rescue and Recovery.
W520: i7-2720QM, Q2000M at 1080/688/1376, 21GB RAM, 500GB + 750GB HDD, FHD screen
X61T: L7500, 3GB RAM, 500GB HDD, XGA screen, Ultrabase
Y3P: 5Y70, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, QHD+ screen

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Where did my hard drive space go

where did my hard drive space go. Is there a way to see where, and how, my hard drive space is being used up?

Download a utility like OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 to provide a map of how your drive space is used. Also, you should look at how much space you consume in your Home folder:
Navigate to /Users/ folder. Select your Home folder. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. This will display in the upper panel the follwing:
Drive Capacity.
Drive space Available.
Drive space Used.

WHERE HAS MY HARD DRIVE SPACE GONE?

I am confused!
I regularly run What Size to see what is using up my hard drive and the figures don't make sense. At the bottom of the finder window it states that I have 19.31gb available. What Size also states that I have 19.31gb available but the What Size figures don't add up. The main items are Users 132gb - Library 17.2gb - Applications 14.1gb - System 3.87gb - Usr 1.05gb - Everything else 2gb. As you can see this totals approx 170gb. My drive is 250gb (net capacity 232gb) which suggests I should have 62gb available and not 19.3gb.
Thoughts and help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
David.

Have you thought of invisible files? If you run [this|http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Automator-Actions---Workflows/Show-Hide-Invi sible-Files.shtml] you should be able to see them and add them to your total. If, in fact, you only have 19.3GB left on your disk, you should think bout clearing some stuff off, or investing in a larger drive, 10% free space is the minimum one should have.

Where's my missing hard drive space?

I posted earlier about this, it may be a bit off topic but if anyone can offer a clue, I would appreciate it.
I got my win 7 upgrade and was waiting until vista started giving me headaches or the win7 service pack1 came out to upgrade...vista got me to upgrade today and I have to admit it was much less painful than i anticipated.
My question is about the missing hard drive space on my Idea center K230 on the box and on the side of the comp it claims a 640 HD (it claims in small print that up to 18gb may be used for the service partition) I questioned this when i first got it and even after deleting all the preloaded crap it was still saying 540 available out of 580GB....then I read that Lenovo has a huge partition for backup. So when I do my upgrade to win 7- 64 bit, I do a clean install and delete the smaller partition and reformat and expand the larger but before installing the new OS it says I have 596 available, so where the hell is the other 44GB of hard drive...did Lenovo rip us off and put 600GB hard drives in the K230's or is there a hidden partition still left that I cant find?
I am running everything off of my 596GB C: drive, I have my virus stuff and video card extras loaded, everything from the upgrade and 21 available patches and new drivers for most of my stuff....right now I am at at 575gb available and if i can ever find a printer driver that works I will create a backup point or disc from there, whatever win 7 allows. I never wanted the Lenovo one button back up and thought it was stupid to put a big glowing button on the keyboard that wipes your system back to when it came out of the box...I had nightmares of someone getting curious and going "what does this button do?"
.I notice I have a program files folder and a program files (x86) folder with a bunch of redundant files. what's the deal with this is Lenovo still hiding a backup program (maybe in that hidden partition?) that fills my hard drive twice as fast or is there a purpose for the file copies?
Any info on the above questions would be appreciated, and for those of you just looking for upgrade info I have good news, when you finally get your win7 upgrade disc it is the easiest windows installation ever, almost copmpletely automated, and very fast. So far the only sticking point is finding a printer driver, but I have 3 printers i can try, maybe one is supported.

Hi wise2u!
You can read all the details about how storage manufacturers use multiples of 1000 to measure disk space, and Windows reports it in multiples of 1024, and there is some overhead for Windows, or you can just use this rule of thumb from wikipedia:
A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.
0.93 * 640GB = 595GB, which is about what you're seeing.
I don't work for Lenovo. I'm a crazy volunteer!

Hard Drive Space Eaten, but where? - 10.6

I can't figure out where 120 GB of Hard Drive Space has gone. I've scoured other similar threads, but none like this:
1 - 451 GB are listed as being used (in Finder/About My Mac/Whatsize/Activity Monitor/etc)
2 - outside programs, including WhatSize, list less. For example, Whatsize (which I paid for), only finds 331 GB of used space (but lists 451 GB as "used" in the upper left corner).
3 - commands like sudo du -hd1 only show me using 284 GB.
I'd like to find WHERE the 120 GB is being eaten before trying to figure out WHY. But I got into the root directory in finder anyway, and found nothing unusual.
More information - I'm using Snow Leopard, I was using Lion earlier but got tired of "Out of Memory" errors (when only 430 / 500 GB were shown, but all sources, as being used). I erased the hard drive in Disk Utility and did a clean install, last week. At that time, I was "using" 410 GB after reinstalling files- so 40 GB have gone missing just this week (I'm not doing much - No, it isn't because iTunes or iPhoto are making copies of things). I should say, overall, the system is screaming fast and working like lightning and I'm happier (compared to Lion).
And finally - the first thing that happened when I bought this laptop was that I had a logic board failure. Literally one day out of the box. So maybe this computer is a lemon. This is my first Mac too.

Where did my Disk Space go?
Slimming your hard drive
OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $1 or is a free utility that checks HD space.
SpaceControl is a free utility that checks HD space.
Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.
Mac OS X (10.6.7)
Use Software Update to update your os to 10.6.8 and anything else that needs to be updated.

Where can I put in more hard drive space on my laptop around Waterloo, Ont?

Hello, I was wondering, where can I get more hard drive space on my laptop, so then I can install Boot camp and still have enough space left for my other stuff. I don't want to loose too much space, I already lost about 9.7 GB to installing Leopard.
Does anyone live in Waterloo, Ontario?

I'm currently a student at the University of Waterloo (2B term starts in September). Here are some options for you:
1) Canada Computers at King/University.
2) CampusTech at UW
3) IST help desk at UW (for UW students only, I think)
Canada Computers is right at the corner of King/Uni. It's on the northwest corner of the intersection, slightly north of University. Look for a blue sign with yellow type within a 30 second walk north of the intersection. They sell all kinds of computer hardware, although they may or may not be able to do the actual transplant for you.
CampusTech is at the Student Life Centre, on the bottom floor (basement). Ask anyone at UW and they'll tell you how to find it. They're "Official Mac Certified", but I don't believe they sell hard drives. I bought my MacBook there and they did a RAM upgrade for me and so far it works well.
The CHIP (Computer Help Information Place) is on the 1st floor (basement) of the Math building at UW. You may have to be a Math student to use them, and if you're not under warranty they may charge you, but I had a problem with my keyboard shortly after buying my MacBook and went there and they fixed it for me. They have really short hours, though, so if you have a day job, this is probably not the best option.

When I attempt to open iphoto, I get the loading icon in the working space/picture area. If I try to reinstall ilife '11, will I lose any pictures? Where, on the hard drive, are all my pictures actually stored?

When I attempt to open iphoto, I get the loading icon in the working space/picture area. If I try to reinstall ilife '11, will I lose any pictures? Where, on the hard drive, are all my pictures actually stored?

You won't lose anything because you have a back up, right?
Most Simple Back Up
Drag the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to another Disk. This will make a copy on that disk.
Slightly more complex:
Use an app that will do incremental back ups. This is a very good way to work. The first time you run the back up the app will make a complete copy of the Library. Thereafter it will update the back up with the changes you have made. That makes subsequent back ups much faster. Many of these apps also have scheduling capabilities: So set it up and it will do the back up automatically. Examples of such apps: Chronosync or DejaVu . But are many others. Search on MacUpdate
Option 1
Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Rebuild iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup.
If that fails:
Option 2
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one. .
Regards
TD

What is using my hard drive space on my macbook pro

Something is using all my hard drive space and I cannot figure out what. Yesterday I had 120GB and now I have 120MB free and got a disk warning. I have noticed this past week that my space has been eaten up. My Mac Book Pro is 2 months old and I have not put any big or fancy programmes on it as I am still getting used to this being my first Mac. One of the selling points for getting a Mac is I heard its programmes took a lot less space. My previous PC that I had for 2 years had a 130GB hard drive and I had 20GB free when I gave it away. I cannot believe I have used all my 500GB hard drive space when I have only installed a few programmes on this one such as Notebook, Pages, and some accounting software. I cannot seem to find details of where the space is being used. Please help.

Mr_Joe wrote:
My Mac Book Pro is 2 months old
I cannot seem to find details of where the space is being used. Please help.
Empty the trash!
Where did my Disk Space go?
Slimming your hard drive
Seven ways to free up drive space
OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $1 or is a free utility that checks HD space.
SpaceControl is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $.99 - FreeSpace shows you how much space is available on all local, connected, and network drives with a single click.
You are still under warranty plus you still have 90 days of free phone tech support. Take advantage of it before it runs out!

"iTunes Media" file in "Previous iTunes Library" taking up 50Gb of much-needed hard drive space. Can this be safely deleted?

Hi everyone,
My 3.5 year old 15" Macbook Pro is running out of hard drive space, so I have been trying to clean out some of the dross. I recently found that there is a file called "Previous iTunes Library" in my iTunes folder that is taking up approximately 50Gb of space. I would love to delete this folder and reclaim the space, but I am not sure what it is or where it came from, and I don't want to lose music files accidentally. Can someone tell me (1) what this folder is and (2) if I can safely delete it?
Here is a screenshot of these folders and their sizes:
Thanks for the help!

Hello facetious1212,
Take a look at this part of the article named iTunes: What are the iTunes library files? Found here http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1660.
Tip: New versions of iTunes sometimes include enhancements to the iTunes library. When you open the new version of iTunes, iTunes upgrades your existing library to the new format and places a copy of the old library in the Previous Libraries folder. If everything goes fine during your upgrade to the latest version of iTunes, you can delete the older iTunes Library files.
All the very best,
Sterling

How do I find out what's eating up my hard drive space?

I installed Leopard quite a while back on my 1,8 GHz PowerPC G5 tower. I had to try twice and call Apple support because I was having problems installing it. I never seem to have much hard drive space, and I don't really have much on this computer. My iTunes library takes up a bit of room, but there's really not much else on the hard drive. I cleaned out some old stuff tonight and made some room, but I am wondering how much of my space is eaten up by the previous OS. Also wondering if Leopard is on here twice because of the double install attempt.
I am trying to make room to install Logic Express 8. So where are the OS's on here so I can trash anything extraneous, and is there a way -- other than individually Apple I'ing everything -- to see what's taking up so much space on my hard drive. As you can probably tell, I'm not the most computer literate person. Thanks.

Try a program such as Disk Inventory X or OmniDiskSweeper.
(50778)

My hard drive is nearly full but I cant find whats taking up all my hard drive space

I have an intel macbook pro with 500 internal HD.
I have 160gb of music in my itues folder with another 7gb on a previous library, I am unable to find the size info of my applications folder but I susspect it to be around 50gb, however I only have 59 gb of free HD space remaining. How to I find out what is using the remainder od my hard drive space? I have not yet checked my iphoto. where would this be? Is there someway of checking to see what folders are the bigest on my hard drive?
I can's work out why my disk is so full.
Any help greatly appreciated. :-)

MacBook Pro
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro

Can't download applications (poss due to hard drive space issue)?

Hi there,
I'm having major hard drive issues with my MacBook Pro OS X 10.4.11 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM laptop.
I use it for video editing and also keep music on it. However for the video editing I use an external hard drive, though I've found some Final Cut Pro files on my internal hard drive before and deleted them whenever I've found them. Sometimes it's an Imovie project, sometimes a straightforward final cut project, sometimes a playout of a final cut project.
My problem is that I now have almost no hard drive space, to the point where I wasn't able to save a Word file last week due to insufficient disk space! I emptied the trash and managed to get it to save in the end.
I immediately went on to the discussions pages and it was suggested to try WhatSize, OmniDiskSweeper and Disk Inventory to identify the files that were taking up all the room. Unfortunately NONE of these applications will download onto my laptop. They're not the only ones, I tried downloading a couple of other applications for music and the like and NOTHING will download!
I went through everything that I felt I knew for certain that I could delete without being detrimental and freed up a small bit of room and tried again but still NOTHING. I then used Onyx on the suggestion of another post and freed up a few gigs (I went from 1.7gb available to 7gb available) and assumed that this would do the trick, however, it hasn't!
What happens when I try to download these (or any) applications is that when i click the "Download Now" area on the webpage it begins to move onto what should be a download progress page or a "download complete" page but instead just spends an eternity "loading", with the little loading wheel on the left of the tab just spinning around and around. I tried leaving it literally all night last night but to no avail, opened it back up again and still the circle was spinning around and around "loading". This has been the case for the several dozen attempts I've made, no matter what the website.
It seems like something of a Catch 22 if the situation is that I can't download these applications that will help me to free up Hard Drive space, because I don't have any Hard Drive space! Though I'd have thought that the 7gb I now have would be ample. Did my laptop turn to self preservation mode perhaps when the hard drive was down to the bare minimum and I wasn't even able to save word documents?
If anybody can help it'd be HUGELY appreciated...
All the best,
Rory

If you open a Finder window you can also sort by size by clicking the size column header. In view options you can also set it to calculate all sizes so it will also show folder sizes. Although not as handy as the cataloging applications you can at least start tracking down where the disk space is going. With video you can probably just copy half a dozen files off and immediately free up many GB.
Note that this isn't just a matter of convenience. OSX makes lots of temporary files and is doing it all the time. If it can't find space for those files it can result in a serious drive crash and that could cost you several hundred dollars in recovery expenses. A Sig indicates, you need space just for computer operation. I feel the % recommendation is a bit vague since people use drives ranging from 10 - 1000 GB in size. My computer regularly uses 6GB of hard drive space for temporary files, and I like to leave wriggle room, so I usually leave at least 15-20GB. You can check the temporary file usage by looking at VM in Activity monitor.
As BDaqua observes, having a crowded drive also slows down your computer. If it has to hunt for nooks and crannies in which to place bits and pieces of bigger files that takes time. Normally one does not have to worry so much about fragmentation of files on a Mac, but your scenario of working with large files on a really crowded drive may be defying that generalization.

Limiting the hard drive space on a managed account

I'm setting up a managed account and want to limet the amount of hard drive space the person gets to use
mac minni solocore Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Once again, a macosxhint comes in handy. The hint describes one way of converting an existing account:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031104223355900
Setting up a new account is easier. Just create a disk image of the desired size, making sure the name of the mounted volume is the same as the user's "home" folder (the name of the disk image doesn't matter). Uncheck the "Ignore ownership..." checkbox in "Get Info", and make sure the user owns both the mounted volume, and the dmg file. Place the disk image in the top level of the user's "home" folder, then change the ownership of the user's folder to "system" (root).
Then, from an "admin" account, enter the command below in "/Applications" > "Utilities" > "Terminal.app", substituting the user's short name for 'username', and the correct name of the disk image:<pre style="overflow:auto; padding: 5px; width: 500px ; font-size: 10px; border:1">sudo /usr/bin/nicl . -create /users/username home_loc '<home_dir><url>file://localhost/Users/username/diskimagename.dmg</url></home_dir>'</pre>But as I mentioned, there are drawbacks to using disk images and it isn't all that effective unless you hunt down every last place on the system where the user has the privileges to save files (including everybody else's "Drop Box" folders. I only mentioned it because it does get brought up as a strategy.

Missing Hard Drive Space (15 GB unaccounted for)

I've had my Mini for about six months now. Love it. Everything is working perfectly except for one oddity that I'm hoping someobody can help me understand and/or correct:
I seem to be missing about 15 GB of hard drive space for no reason - at least that I can understand.
Here's what I get from the info screen on my drive:
Capacity: 74 GB
Available: 5.9 GB
Used: 68.31
All I can account for is 52.22 GB
Music: 41.11 GB
Movies: 4.33 GB
Pictures: 3.6 GB
Library: 547 MB
System: 1.81 GB
Documents 832.7 MB
Any idea why I seem to be missing 15 GB?
Thanks in advance.

I run Mac Janitor about once a week and still have
this problem. I'm assuming that is similar to the
program you mentioned.
To address that specific point: No. Mac Janitor performs one specific set of routine tasks (not all that critical - and not needed as frequently as once per week) while YASU performs a range of system-related maintenance tasks, which include those Mac Janitor handles, but go well beyond what it is capable of doing.
Yours is just such a situation where YASUs functions could prove useful in themselves, and would in any event help in narrowing down the cause of the loss of space, since it will either release the used drive space, or in failing to do so, confirm that it is being used by files. In the former case the problem is resolved, and in the latter it would then lead to use of software such as 'WhatSize' (downloadable from www.versiontracker.com) to examine the entire contents of the drive and establish exactly which files and directories are taking up what amount of storage space. Most mysterious losses of space such as yours can be readily resolved once you know where the space has gone!

Missing Hard Drive Space + Other Issues

My Macbook's been acting funny lately - it wouldn't always come out of sleep, and every now and then an application would crash but its icon would stay in the Dock and there would be no way to get rid of it. When I tried typing in my password on the login screen (when it was coming out of sleep) the field would keep losing focus and delete everything in it. I have the 120GB hard drive (It says 111, but I assume that's the 1024 vs 1000 thing), and about a year and a half ago it failed, but I brought it to the Apple Store and they gave me a new one, which has been working fine.
The macbook had been doing some weird stuff, so I've been using the computer I'm typing on for the last few weeks, but two days ago I decided to reset the PRAM and SMC and try using the macbook again. It was working fine, but then I locked the screen and did something else for a while. I went to go shut it down that night, and it wouldn't show me the login screen for unlocking the screen, and it showed me the spinning cursor instead. I just shut the top, and the next morning it was just giving me a black screen when I opened the top.
I held down the power button to shut it off, and later in the day turned it back on again, and it seemed to be working. I was running a few applications (Firefox, Bitpim, and Transmission) when it started crashing again. The menu bar didn't work, the dock wouldn't show, keyboard shortcuts didn't work, etc. I shut the top and went somewhere for a few hours.
I came back, and was going to shut down the computer by holding the power button, so while it was still in sleep I unplugged both of my external hard drives. When I unplugged the USB one it turned on the computer, so I opened it, typed in my password, and plugged the drives back in. The computer seemed to be working again, but about a minute later a window popped up saying my startup disk's space was low. When I'd shut the top that morning there had been around 40 - 50GB left, but now there was about 500MB left on the disk. The size of my User folder was still the same - around 20GB, and I'm trying to see the size of the System folder now, but the hard drive is being extremely slow. I'm also trying to use Disk Inventory X, but it's taking an extremely long time (like 10 minutes for a file that's only a few KB).
The dock also seems to be "frozen" - no new applications I open show in the dock, even if I'm using them, and when I clicked to open them in finder they showed up in my recently opened folder in the Dock, but didn't actually open. I clicked on them again through that folder and they actually open, but it still doesn't show them in finder. Applications that I've quit (and their process is gone in Activity Monitor) are still in the Dock with the little dot under them that they're open.
The Macbook is still under warranty, but I live far away from the closest Apple Store, and it would be difficult for me to get anyone to drive me there, so I'd prefer some sort of a solution where I wouldn't need to bring it in (But I know I'll probably need to, and I will be able to, just not for a week or two).
Are any of the problems related? Is there anything I can do on my own to fix it? Should I try rebooting it, even if the hard drive is almost empty (Doesn't that cause problems booting it?), or should I wait until Disk Inventory X finishes first?
Edit: There was a folder in /Volumes that had the name of my external hard drive, and had some files in it (The ones that were being used in Transmission), so I deleted those and got the hard drive space back. All of the other problems are still happening though - my dock is still all screwed up, etc.
Message was edited by: cfogel

Also, some more details:
I while ago I tried rebooting and it just gave me a gray screen and played the startup chime over and over, but I held down the power button and tried again and it worked. However, when I boot it stays on the gray screen for a while before it shows me the apple logo, then it stays on that for a while before it shows me the spinning thing that it's loading. Also, once it boots it hangs on a blue screen for a while before letting me log in.
When I look in Console there's always a million "Feb 5 18:19:58 localhost kernel[0]: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad: family specific matching fails" for every piece of hardware from every boot.
For a while when I tried verifying my hard drive using Disk Utility it crashed the computer. I've tried repairing permissions, checked my SMART status, and used various maintenance tools.

Where is my hard drive space?

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