Disk space vanishing, other strange behavior

In the last two days TechTool has been announcing that my free disk space is getting low. Started at 15%, but it keeps dropping down to 1%. I've deleted about 100GB of data in the last two days, but it isn't helping.
Checked my log files which aren't ridculously big. None of my processes are using a fraction of the 160GB+ it shows as being allocated to VM. Some strange log entries in console related to MacHelper, but I don't think I ever installed it. Ran an uninstaller just in case.
Prior to this happening some other odd things have been happening for a week or so:
External drives aren't dismounting correctly. Click eject and the name remains grayed out and if I unplug the drive I get chided for removing a drive.
System hangs and requires forced restart. Hangs during restart on the desktop image.
Had some trouble with an external e-sata drive dismounting all the time using the card slot adaptor for e-Sata. Card would get extremely hot. Used FW800 but had strange behavior with 5 additional drives reminiscent of SCSI. Once I changed the cables around it stopped doing this.

You may not have gotten all of MacKeeper. From an earlier post of mine:
I'd search for it using EasyFind. Enter "MacKeeper" and "Zeobit." Set EF to scan all files and folders, invisible, case insensitive, package contents. Search using boolean and phrase. It will probably do a more thorough job than Spotlight. If you can't "Destroy" from EF, use Reveal in Finder to trash and authenticate from there.
It is also known to install a Windows emulator called "wine;" search for that.
Also, look in the Keychain for anything MacKeeper or zeobit related, and for its cookies in your browser. When finished, empty the Trash and restart.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html
Somehow, as BDAqua suggested, I'm still suspecting it's the logs filling up with a constantly repeating message. Are there any other Users? Can you log in to those and see what's going on with those logs?
Permissons repair has nothing to do with this.
Get OmniDisk Sweeper. Run it logged in to all your users.
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/

Similar Messages

20gb of Disk Space Vanishes? On it's own?

Hi guys, I'm a long time mac user and have never seen anything like this.
I run a 2.53gz MBP 5,1. with 4gb of ram and 320gb HD. I have the drive partitioned with a 60gb NTFS bootcamp partition for WindowsXP that I use with Parallels 4. I use Time Machine to backup to a 2tb WD drive.
So, I've been running the machine all day long with approximately 24.5gb of disk space. I left my desk around 6:00 today and I just came back to find a low disk space error and saw that I only had 1.8gb left, and watched it drip down to 1.5, 1.3 and 1.1gb right in front of my eyes without doing anything at all! I rebooted and now the computer has been sitting steady at 5.7gb. I looked through my timemachine archive to earlier in the day and the last update was right after I left (with 24.5gb of disk space left) the next update is inexplicably at 1.7gb. I did get info on all the main folders in my root directory (Applications, Library, System & Users) and the identical folders now and there is almost no difference whatsoever in folder size! Yet, when you look at the bottom of the window in the time machine reference from a few hours earlier it says 24.5gb available, and then go back to the "now" window it says 5.7gb available...
I'm totally baffled. approximately 19gb of disk space just completely vanished and I can't account for the change or the increase in used disk space anywhere.
The only recent update was the Security Update 2010-001 that was issued on the 19th.
I have tried to restart. Reset the PRAM. Checked the SMART status using Disk Utility. Everything checks out.
The only thing I could possibly point to is an issue with Bootcamp and the NTFS drive. However I was not running bootcamp or parallels when this happened.
Time Machine was stuck at "Calculating Changes... (15%)" when I came back and the Time Machine drive is nearly full...but I don't think this should matter.
Also Time Machine hasn't completed a full backup since the drive was at it's original 24.5gb. I'm wondering if it got stuck when doing a backup and somehow is confused between what is backed up and what isn't and there is disk space being "held" somewhere by time machine somehow.
Any suggestions on what happened to the mystery 19gb?
Message was edited by: gabeotron

The two swap files sound OK, you will always have at least one of approximately 60MBs. The sleepimage is also normal: it will be about the size of the RAM you have, and contains the content of your actual RAM. The point being that if you put your computer into hibernate, or for a laptop the battery runs out of juice, when the machine is again brought back into action it can resume from where it was when things were stopped. So that is normal.
It sounds like perhaps a run-away log file could be responsible. You might take a look in
/private/var/log
Arrange by size and see what you've got. My biggest one is the folder for DiagnosticMessages, at 5MBs. Everything else is in the KB range.
If that doesn't turn up the culprit you can use the Terminal commands.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

150 Gbs of Disk Space Vanished

Hello Everyone!
     Recently I have been EXTREMLEY frustrated with my computer. I was recently trying to free up some space on my mac, and I found out I have already taken up 300 Gbs of harddrive space out of 500 Gbs. So I did some poking around, and 250 Gbs were taken up on my personal profile. My Documents only have about 11 Gbs in it, I have 60 Gbs of Photos and Videos, and the rest in other places. But looking at each folder in my personal profile only brought up 100 Gbs total. There is 150 Gbs that just are not there.
     I do a ton of visual effects and Photoshop work, so I would like all the space I can get. On top of that I wanted to install a windows partition for gaming purposes, but my disk space just seems to be flying away. I am normally a tech savy guy, and I have no idea what to do. There is literally nothing I can think of doing that will somehow get all my disk space back.
               Please, if anyone knows how to fix this, please help me as soon as you can!
                    Thanks!
                              Evan Groover

Well thank you Allan!
It seems most of it was allocated to my Steam folder, which makes sense! Since I am moving my video games over to my PC side, I guess I can delete those... Still searching for more, but that took up 80 Gbs. I have a feeling I will find useless stuff somewhere else.
Evan

Disk space vanished

Hello out there!
I was just "cleaning out" my mac to get some free disk space when I noticed something odd: all my folders sum up to a total of about 52GB, but when I get the info for my hard drive, it tells me i have 85GB of used disk space! That is a **** of a lot of memory missing. I tried to delete cache, but no visible result... What is going on here?

This should help:
Link
Note that since there are currently no (zero) viruses that affect Mac OS X, it may be a waste of time for you to run NAV at all. And if you do want to keep using NAV, updating to the latest version would certainly be preferable to suffering the spacesuckingfile.XXXXX bug again.

Spaces site template strange behavior

dear all
i have a strange site template behavior
i have webcenter spaces application and i develop a custom site template for it and make it default
every thing goes fine but suddenly the portal change its template to the default spaces template not my custom template
when i check the spaces configuration i found my custom template as default template
when i check the pages i found the order of the pages changed and the home page go down in the order and once i reorder the home page to the top things get normal and it works as expected.
any suggestions
regards

I have seen this happen before and found exceptions in the logs . I can't remember the exact exceptions now but possibly related to database connections, etc.
So, check the webcenter logs to see if there are any issues.

Mail not getting all messages from server and other strange behavior

Hello All,
Mail has been doing some odd things for me of late (at least the last week) and I'm lost for a solution to my problem. As far as I can tell, perhaps my Prefs. have become corrupted, or at least something in relation to Mail has become corrupted. Perhaps someone has a solution to this issue before I have to back it all up and NUKE the whole **** app to get back up and running properly.
The main issue I appear to be having is that Mail is not getting all of my Mail messages from my server. I can log into my web-mail interface provided by my domain host and can see there that there are many e-mails that don't appear to be coming down the pipe to the Mail.app client. I'm getting some e-mail's but not all....
*Here are all the things that I've checked:*
• The missing e-mails are not being picked up as Junk and are not in the Junk folder
• I have done a search within Mail for the missing e-mail's and nothing turns up anywhere.
• I have checked on the server end that I'm not maxing out my InBox or that there are any other service issues from my domain host provider.
• I have been into Prefs and checked my account settings - most (see below) of which appear to be as normal and are fine.
*Here are the weird things that I've noticed:*
• When I went into the Prefs. for the account in question, I noticed that my login had changed. For example - it usually it is "[email protected]", however it had seemed to have changed to just "johndoe" - I know this wasn't me as my domain host will not allow me to access any mail unless the login is the full mail address.
• In RULES, every rule I double click to check on seems mostly fine, apart from the fact that every "Account is:" the pull down menu just appears as blank. Usually it says "Account is: ([email protected])"
It's there last 2 items that make me think something is corrupted - so I guess my question is, what pref or file has corrupted and how can I fix it without having to give Mail.app a digital enema?
Any assistance would be most helpful - missing some but not all your incoming e-mail messages is quite annoying, as you can guess...!
Thanks,
Boz

Hello Boz.
This appears to be a rules issue. Mail is almost certainly downloading those messages, but they’re probably being processed by your rules in an unexpected way — given the information you’ve provided, maybe because there is something wrong with the file where the account settings are stored.
Do you have any Mail plug-ins? In the Finder, go to each of the following folders (if they exist). What do you see there?
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Mail/Bundles/
~/Library/InputManagers/
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
To make accurately reporting this information easier, you may open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command (you can just copy it here and paste it in Terminal), and press <Return>. You can then copy the output of that command from Terminal and paste it in your reply to this post:
ls -1 /Library/InputManagers /Library/Mail/Bundles ~/Library/InputManagers ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
<hr>
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
After having fixed all the filesystem issues, if any, and ensuring that there’s enough space available on the startup disk (a few GB, plus the space needed to make a backup copy of the Mail folder), try this:
1. Write down your Mail > Preferences > Accounts settings or take screen shots of them.
2. If you have a .Mac account and .Mac synchronization of Mail data is enabled either in Mail > Preferences > General or in System Preferences > .Mac, disable it before proceeding.
3. Quit Mail.
4. Make a backup copy of the ~/Library/Mail folder, just in case something goes wrong while trying to solve the problem. You can do this in the Finder by dragging the Mail folder to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down, for example. This is where all your mail is locally stored.
5. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Preferences/. Locate com.apple.mail.plist and move it to the Desktop (to be deleted if this solves the problem). If you have a backup of your data that includes a working copy of this file, you may try restoring it from the backup to avoid steps 6-8.
6. Open Mail. You’ll have to set up your non-.Mac accounts from scratch all over again. If given the option to import existing mailboxes or something like that, don’t. Just enter the account information and Mail will automagically rediscover the data in ~/Library/Mail/ when done.
7. You’ll have to re-configure some of your Mail > Preferences settings. For spam-related security reasons, the first thing you should do is go to Preferences > Viewing and disable Display remote images in HTML messages if it’s enabled.
8. As a side effect of re-creating com.apple.mail.plist, Mail might rename Outbox (which is where messages waiting to be sent are stored) to Delivered. The name of that mailbox is actually a misnomer, as it would contain messages (if any) that couldn’t be delivered for some reason. You can delete that mailbox if you wish.
9. If the problem is fixed now and .Mac synchronization of Mail data was enabled at the beginning, enable it again, go to System Preferences > .Mac > Advanced, click Reset Sync Data, and choose the appropriate options to reset the Mail data stored on the .Mac server with the data locally stored on the computer, i.e. sync data must flow from the computer to the .Mac server.
<hr>
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.

Strange behaviors

I was in the Finder going through my files trying to free up some disk space and some strange behaviors happened. As I go through the media files (video clips, flash files, etc.) they automatically play even though I did NOT hit the space bar to invoke Quicklook option and it happens to all of the files in that folder. Now I wasn't bothered by that, just thought it was strange however what I found interesting is as all of these happening is the Apple Menu Bar is disappear but as I move the mouse up top it reappear as if it has a hide menu bar and unhide the menu bar as I hover over with the mouse. Does that mean that it is possible to do a hide/unhide menu bar option? Never seen that before, does anyone else experience this?

Welcome to Apple Discussions.
8lias wrote:
Does that mean that it is possible to do a hide/unhide menu bar option?
No, it only means you are able to do it because there is some corruption either in your Home folder or in the system. Let's find out:
Create a new account, name it "test" and see how your apps work in that User acct? (That will tell if your problem is systemwide or limited to your User acct.) This account is just for test, do nothing further with it.
Open System Preferences >> Accounts >> "+" make it an admin account.
If the problem is present in the test account also, then it is systemwide. In this case try repairing this with the 10.5.2 Combo Update This is a fuller install, as opposed to an incremental "delta" update so it should overwrite any files that are damaged or missing. It does not matter if you have applied it before.
(Note: If you are running build 9C7010 do not install the Update.)
Remember to Verify Disk before update and repair permissions after update from /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.
If the problem does not appear in the test account try starting in "Safe Mode" (It will take a bit more time to startup because it runs a directory check first).
If that works go to System Preferences >> Accounts >> Login Items and remove them. Boot normally and test. If there are still problems, go to ~(yourHome)/Library/Contextual Menu Items and move whatever is there to the desktop. Then do the same with /Library/Contextual Menu Items. Lastly, try moving /Users/Home)/Library/Fonts to your desktop and restarting.
Log out/in or restart, if that sorts it start putting items back one at a time until you find the culprit.
Let us know.
-mj

Free disk space in Finder vs Terminal df command

i am in process of writing a shell script to backup our data.
before starting the backup process, i am checking how much space is left on the disk:
terminal> df -k /my_data_directory/
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 244781464 173055384 71470080 71% /
this states 71.47 GB free space on /
however, the Finder reports 96.17 GB free space on Macintosh HD (which is also mounted on /).
where does that difference come from? how can i "calculate" the real free disk space?

tuscan wrote:
do i get your answer right:
this means the Finder is reporting an amount of free space one can never use?
its number includes those bytes that are unused in used disk blocks?
e.g. say a block is 8k an my specific disk, and i'm saving a file with 1k of text.
the Finder would report 7k of these 8k as free space?
while df takes the whole 8k block as "used"?
As jsd2 points out, it is more complicated than that. I don't have local snapshots running on my machine but I still have a significant discrepancy, although not as large as yours.
df is a fast tool and only looks at blocks. The Finder does more work and keeps track of file sizes and, apparently, the potential to delete them. But if you had a one-byte file, those other 4095 bytes wouldn't necessarily be wasted. You could write another 4095 bytes to that file without losing any disk space.

ITunes shows different disk space during synchronisation and after completing synchronisation

I have about 13'000 songs on my iMac (actual used hard disk space 107 GB) and i sync the music with my iPhone 5. I use the sync option «... convert titles larger than 128 kBit/s ...», so that there is enough space for all my songs on the iPhone. If i start the sync process, it says 13'000 songs, space needed 49 GB. After completet sync process, it shows 54 GB disk space used für the 13'000 songs!?!?! After a few minutes, there again, i get the right information about used disk space für music displayed, 49 GB. Anybody any idea what causes this effect? Thx for any idea.

And here two screenshots of the inconsistent behaviour of used / free disk space:

Javax.mail.MessagingException: 452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again

I am getting this exception , while my application is trying to send mails. The complete stack trace is below
com.bp.ebus.downstream.util.ErrorLevelException: javax.mail.MessagingException: 452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again
later
at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.issueCommand(SMTPTransport.java:879)
at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.mailFrom(SMTPTransport.java:599)
at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.sendMessage(SMTPTransport.java:319)
at com.bp.ebus.interfaces.SmtpClient.sendMessage(SmtpClient.java:252)
at com.bp.ebus.interfaces.SmtpClient.send(SmtpClient.java:191)
at com.bp.ebus.downstream.ejb.ServicesSessionBean.sendNewEmails(ServicesSessionBean.java:105)
at com.bp.ebus.downstream.ejb.ServicesSessionBean_f7hinc_EOImpl.sendNewEmails(ServicesSessionBean_f7hinc_EOImpl.java:
166)
at com.bp.ebus.downstream.ejb.ServicesSessionBean_f7hinc_EOImpl_WLSkel.invoke(Unknown Source)
at weblogic.rmi.internal.BasicServerRef.invoke(BasicServerRef.java:305)
at weblogic.rmi.cluster.ReplicaAwareServerRef.invoke(ReplicaAwareServerRef.java:93)
at weblogic.rmi.internal.BasicServerRef.handleRequest(BasicServerRef.java:274)
at weblogic.rmi.internal.BasicExecuteRequest.execute(BasicExecuteRequest.java:22)
at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:139)
at weblogic.kernel.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:120)
at weblogic.rmi.internal.BasicOutboundRequest.sendReceive(BasicOutboundRequest.java:85)
at weblogic.rmi.cluster.ReplicaAwareRemoteRef.invoke(ReplicaAwareRemoteRef.java:262)
at weblogic.rmi.cluster.ReplicaAwareRemoteRef.invoke(ReplicaAwareRemoteRef.java:229)
at weblogic.rmi.internal.ProxyStub.invoke(ProxyStub.java:35)
at $Proxy4.sendNewEmails(Unknown Source)
at com.bp.ebus.lighthouse.jobs.SendEmail.run(SendEmail.java:70)
at java.util.TimerThread.mainLoop(Timer.java:435)
at java.util.TimerThread.run(Timer.java:385)
My OS is solaris and Application server is weblogic.

The message is coming from your mail server.
Looks like your server is out of disk space.

Determining free disk space in a platform independent "java-like" way?

how can i determine free disk space in a platform independent "java-like" way?

Search the forum "free disk space".

Insufficient disk space when opening Aperture library in iPhoto

I just created a fresh library with 3000 photos (6GB) in Aperture. I then tried to open that library using iPhoto by holding down the Option key on launch but got an alert: "Insufficient Disk Space: There is not enough free space on the disk that contains this library to upgrade it. It is estimated that you need at least 6GB of free space."
OK, I only have 4GB of free space on my HD. But why would iPhoto need to upgrade the library to begin with? I'm using the latest version of both Aperture (3.5.1) and iPhoto (9.5.1) and I thought they use the exact same library. And even if iPhoto needs to upgrade the library, why would it need an extra 6GB when the Aperture library is only 6GB? If opening the library in iPhoto results in increasing the library size from 6GB to 12GB, I'd rather not do it. Am I missing something?

OK, I only have 4GB of free space on my HD. But why would iPhoto need to upgrade the library to begin with? I'm using the latest version of both Aperture (3.5.1) and iPhoto (9.5.1) and I thought they use the exact same library. And even if iPhoto needs to upgrade the library, why would it need an extra 6GB when the Aperture library is only 6GB?
iPhoto and Aperture are using the same library, but Aperture has preference settings, that prevent previews or faces from being created. If you open an Aperture library in iPhoto, the library size may increase, since iPhoto may be creating files, that Aperture did not create. Probably iPhoto's estimated was too pessimistic, but opening an Aperture library can increase the library size.
But photograhis is right. You should not be running any applications at all, if you do not have at least 20GBof free disk space.

Disk space error - final cut express 4

I'm new to final cut express. I color corrected a 60 minute video clip and attempted to export the sequence to Quicktime. It got about 80% complete and stopped due to out of disk space error. I have about 16 GB of remaining internal hard drive space on my macbook pro. I just received the software last night, so I do not yet understand scratch disk setup, etc. Is there a preference I should change or should I export to an external hard drive? I'm attempting to
import the final clip into imovie and idvd.

In addition to Al's response, with only 16GB left on your internal hard drive you are effectively out of disk space. You need to move stuff off that drive and/or delete what you no longer need. If you are doing video it is wise to keep at least 50% free space especially if the drive capacity is 500GB or less.
If you are doing HD video, here are some numbers to consider:
1 hour source media (video clips) = ~45GB
1 hour of render files of your 1 hour movie = ~45GB
1 hour exported QT movie = ~45GB
1 hour iDVD project of your completed QT movie = 2 to 4 GB
So your 1 hour project could easily consume 140GB of disk space.

HT1414 how much disk space is needed for backup and restore.

i want to unlock iphone,for this how much disk space is needed for backup and restore activiti

OK... now subtract the music. That's not part of the iPhone backup. Neither are apps, but in app data is.
Why are you asking? Did you get an error? If so, then clear out some disk space.

How much Minimum Disk Space is Required for Time Machine?

Are there any recommendations from Apple for the size of external hard drive for Time Machine?
Also, is there any formula for the amount of hard drive space = how any days, months, or years of backup available?
Sorry about the poorly worded question.

Size of HD = IBS + [30*DCD + 487*DCD]NM
or
Size of HD = IBS + 365NMDCD
where
IBS = Initial Backup Size (GBs)
NM = Number of Months wanted before HD fills
DCD = Daily Churn Data in GBs
So lets say
IBS=160 GB
NM=24 (2 years wanted before having to worry about disk full)
DCD=0.05 GB of daily churned data on average (50 MB of changed and new data)
Size of HD = 160 + 365240.05 = 598 GB
If you wanted just NM = 12 then the HD size should be around 350 to 400 GB
Much depends on how many months you want to go before being bothered with disk full and how much average daily data churn you have.
Note that TM will make much effort to clean up old data that can be safely deleted before giving up when disk becomes full. It will also provide you with the opportunity to clean up old backups yourself to free up space.
Of course you can always re-format the TM backup HD and start over again but you obviously lose your TM backup history. You can also to decide you can delete the oldest 6 months of data and keep the more recent history to continue on with thr freed up disk space.

Disk space vanishing, other strange behavior

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