Free space on boot drive constantly decreases until reboot

Hi there. I have a really weird thing happening that I've never seen before.
I'm running 10.7.4 on an iMac, and have about 45GB free on the system drive. At least that's right after I boot up the system. After that, the free space available on my HD slowly but constantly decreases, and the computer slowly but surely becomes less responsive. When the free space on the boot drive gets down around 37GB (which takes 2-3 days... I usually never turn the machine off) I get so many spinning beach balls... in ALL applications... that the computer becomes basically unuseable and I am forced to reboot. But as soon as I do, free space is back up to 45GB, and computer is snappy and fast again.
What the heck?

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
(2) You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

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Erasing Free Space on boot drive

I am getting ready to sell my older Mac Book Air with a SSD. I would like to erase all free space on the drive to assure that any confidential data I hadn't securely deleted earlier is not recoverable. In my most recent cleanup, I moved all my own files and installed apps to the trash and attempted to empty the trash securely. When the number of files to be removed was down to 30,000 (from neaerly 100,000) it stopped securely removing them. I rebooted several times and those files were still in the trash. I attempted each time to securely empty the trash. It would pop up the progress dialog box but would immeidately close it cleaning up nothing. Finally, I switched to non-secure and emptied the Trash.
I've done to the Disk Utility, selected the SSD Drive (Macintosh HD) and selected the Erase tab. The Erase Free Space button is disabled. How can I securely clean up the free space so that whoever buys the system will not be able to recover whatever, confidential data may still be hanging around in the free disk space list?
Thanks,

read this article, it is outdated, but the info in it is still relevant: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24002. Do a 7 pass erase. That conformed to the U.S. Department of Defense's security procedures until they changed their rules to that of completely destroying hard drives physically instead.

My boot drive space constantly decreases until reboot

So the longer I leave my imac on, running 10.7.4, the slower and slower it gets, and the more spinning beach balls I get.
At the same time, there becomes less and less free space on my boot drive. I mean over the course of 2 days it can drop from 77GB free to 63GB free.
What the heck is going on? And how can I figure out what the culprit is?

Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
(1) You have a long-running process with a memory leak (i.e., a bug), or
(2) You don't have enough memory installed for your usage pattern.
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination. In Activity Monitor, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table once or twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If one process (not including "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
This suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details:
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines: About the Virtual Memory System
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly apprec

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly appreciated. how can find the hidden temporary files using the terminal what do i type in?

It's more likely a failed Erase Free Space, which creates a huge temporary file; that's why it looks like you have no more available drive space. You can recover from this. See these links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10938738#10938738
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/quickie/recovering_from_a_failed_secure_erase_fre e_space
Post back if you need any help with this.

How do I get Finder windows to display free space on hard drive?

In Snow Leopard if you opened a Finder window, at the bottom it would show how much free space your hard drive had left. Lion by default does not do this. Is there a way where I can turn that option on so i can view space availible when opening Finder windows?

Stop blaming yourself. You're not an idiot and it's never the user's fault. It's always the designer's fault. Read "The Design of Everyday Things' by Donald Norman. It's a gerat book about how everyday things can be just difficult to use. He's been also a former Apple employee. Great reading!

Re: Oggetto: Re: Knowing the free space on a drive

-----Original Message-----
From: Luca Gioppo <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, March 19, 1999 9:13 AM
Subject: Oggetto: Re: Knowing the free space on a drive
Obviously the solut

I thanks people that gave their suggestion, but unfortunately these are not
what I was looking for.
The runcommand does not redirect output to a textdata but accept the name
of an output file in a textdata, and in win95 it doesn't exists a grep
command.
The thing that bother me is that if I use the environment console, open the
machine agent and look up the instruments i find the volumes into it,
afterwards having done this operation I manage to find the volume agents
form the machine one even from tool program.
It is clear that the e-console issues some commands during the instrument
menu of the machine that I miss, but perhaps are available from tool.
Does someone from Forte knows how to reproduce the same commands of
instrument menu in tool (I was told that e-console was written using forte
so...)?
TIA
Luca Gioppo
To unsubscribe, email '[email protected]' with
'unsubscribe forte-users' as the body of the message.
Searchable thread archive <URL:http://pinehurst.sageit.com/listarchive/>

Adding partition in free space on internal drive

So, when I bought my 20" Intel iMac, I immediately repartitioned the drive, and created one 200GB main partition for OSX and left ~32GB of free space for a future WinXP partition (which as of today became useful .
However, I cannot find any way to add a partition in the free space without trying some commercial tool (like iPartition). Disk Utility only has the option to repartition -- in OSX it won't let me because it's the system drive, and from the install CD it wants to nuke my whole drive to repartition, even though I don't need to touch the OSX partition at all. I've also dug through diskutil, pdisk, and fdisk, but none of those have an option to add a partition.
It seems totally stupid that I can't just create a partition in free space without killing the whole disk. I have 80GB of stuff on this drive I can't easily backup.
Any ideas???
Mac OS X (10.4.5)

The second partition is not for backups... it's for a FAT filesystem for installing Windows so that I can run my research software and play games at native speed.
Installing XP does not involve any firmware changes at all. The EFI bootloader is a blessed file that sits on the HFS partition, and the boot sector of the XP install CD is modified to talk to the custom EFI bootloader.
I actuallly did solve the problem through some brute force after my post. There is a command-line utility built into OSX now called 'gpt' which can edit GUID Partition Tables as used on Intel Macs. I booted off my OSX install CD, went to a terminal, unmounted /dev/disk0, added the new partition (gpt luckily does have an option for adding and removing partition entries without repartitioning the whole disk... Apple really needs to update Disk Utility if you ask me -- this is a common and simple task usually), then rebooted. It all worked fine!

Problem with ytdump-200.6.1.1-1377716466. It is a, "Yahoo crash log", uses up all free space on C: drive

Your Question:
Ever since my firefox was updated to be more compatible with Yahoo I have a terrible problem with ytdump-200.6.1.1-1377716466. It is a, "Yahoo crash log dump", that fills up all the free space on my C: drive drive, no matter when and how many times I erase it, and no matter what I remove from the C: drive.

What was involved in making Firefox more compatible with Yahoo? Assuming that the "yt" part stands for Yahoo Toolbar, you could disable that temporarily to see whether that resolves the issue.
Try here:
orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Extensions category
Disable the Yahoo toolbar(s) and if a link appears to restart Firefox, click that as the last step.
Note: if you have any unsubmitted forms you are working on, it's probably best to finish your work before restarting Firefox.

Macintosh HD and Bootcamp Installer Disagree on Free space on Hard Drive

Im having a hard drive issue.
I have 500 gb and macosx shows about 300gb free.
I'm attempting to install windows and the assistant gives about 100gb of space but I'd like 200 or so for windows.
Theres a discrepancy in available hard drive space!
I had installed windows prior and made the mistake of following some bad advice and re partitioning for extra space within windows 8. After this I lost the windows partition. I have a third party disk utility that says the drive needs repaired. The drive has issues with discrepancies in drive space and sectors used and not used. The volume gets repaired and allowed some more space for windows (the 100gb) but I should assumably be allowed most all the free space available and would like to (iI have an external for large files).
How can I fix this? I dont mind command line. Are there third party utilities?

You have two issues.
1. Partitioning within Windows and OS X are using two different personalities of a disk, and if not kept in sync, you run into this issue. Apple does not allow Windows partition to be resized because they do not provide the appropriate tools to keep them in sync.
2. If you are willing to take a backup of OS X and all your files, the cleanest method is to erase the drive and restore from a backup, preferably using a Time Machine backup.

Any thoughts on tackling a lack of free space on hard drive?

Photoshop Elements 9 has left me with little free space on my hard drive. Per my conversation with Adobe tech support, an external hard drive (which I currently do not own) should not be used to run Photoshop 9, but rather I should move my pictures there. (I have several "hundreds of pictures in jpeg). I would think that this is OK for editing, whereby I'm only working with one picture at a time. If I follow Adobe's suggestion, wouldnt I essentially be eliminating the Organizer function once the pictures are moved to an external drive? Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Some of the newer PC's don't have internal drive space because they have raid'ed drives.
I purchased 3 external 1Tb drives, 2 at home 1 at my office and I backup (never mind how to the office, that's a whole other thing) to one at home and one at the office -- and my phots are on the other 1Tb at home.
They cost me $99 each, but shortly after they become $69 each -- not much given the cost of the photos!

How come free space on internal disk is decreasing when I am exporting videos to imovie library on external disk

Hi,
I am moving all the videos I have in my iphoto library on my computer to the imovie library (version 9.0.9 ) I have on an external disk to free some space on the internal disk.
Afterwards, I am deleting them from the iphoto library BUT I noticed that the free space on the internal disk does not increase. Movies are decreasing but the space is going to back ups. I am doing this process as I want to have more space on the internal disk. Do I do something wrong or is this the normal process ?
Also, I have Imovie (new version - which I am not using, at least not for the moment) and the old version (created when I updated) on my internal disk and a copy I made befor the update on an external disk.
Is it safe to delete the old version on the internal disk ?
Thanks for helping me out !

Hi,
On my mac I have iphoto and two versions of imovie - application that was created last october (2.9 gb -- so far I did not use this app) and 9.0.9 imovie folder (1,197,747,040 bytes - 1.22 GB on disk) .
On the external disk, I made a copy of 9.0.9 version some while ago (to be eaxct, before the new version was installed last october).
This what I do:
- import the video into imovie on my internet disk via "file, import, photos, iphoto library and select..."
- then I delete the videos from the iphoto event, emtpy trash in iphoto and empty trash on my dock
I photo version I am using is 9.5.
What do you mean with your third question ?
I back up on a 2nd external disk (used only for back up) with time machine.
When I check the space available (on this mac, more info, storage...) I noticed backups take up 7,6 GB. Before I started the above mentioned process of importing videos in imovie on the external disk the backups showed 0. What did I do wrong ?
Thanks for helping me out.
Brigitte

How to reclaim "free space" on TM drive?

I had 2 partitions on my external drive. I've deleted one of them as it is no longer need. Is there a way I can tell my TM partition to reclaim this new "free space" without having to erase the entire disk?
Thanks

Dryvlyne wrote:
That's exactly what I did to erase the partition, however, that partition is/was positioned first on the drive, above the TM partition. Hopefully that makes sense, but that's where I'm stuck at.
Thanks
in that case you can not absorb it into the other partition without reformatting the whole drive (that will wipe all the data off it). At least you can not do it with disk utility. Using disk utility you can only adjust the size of a partition by dragging its lower right end up or down.

How to format "free space" on a drive?

I bought a 2 TB hard drive and created a 1.5 TB partition in ExFat format. The other 500 Mb was left as "Free space". I thought that I could format that free space later, but now I don't see a way to do so. When I select that partition in Disk Utilities all the options seem to be grayed out. Is it possible to format "free space"?

You would have to delete the partition and add a new one.

Difference in reporting free space on my drive

Hi all,
I have a macbook pro 2011 running Lion on a 500GB HDD. I am having a small issue in reading how much free space do I have on my hard drive.
The status bar in the Finder window reports:
DiskUtility.app reports:
I don't have any partitions on the hard drive (other than what Lion creates on it's own) and "Macintosh HD" is the only drive I have. I do use time machine and I have already disabled local backups but the difference in free space stays. I am just not sure what is causing this huge difference. If it was a couple of GBs I'd happily ignore but this is more than 80GB.
Any idea?

malikons wrote:
the next day Finder synced with DiskUtility automagically. I think it takes time to remove the local backups.
Yes, especially on a busy system, and if there were a lot of files involved.
I rebooted my macbook into recovery mode and fixed the hard drive errors. So, I believe, fixing the HDD errors and disabling local backups eventually fixed the issue.
Yup, directory errors can cause all sorts of weirdness.

Free space on hard drive--incorrect reading?

I have a Powerbook G4 with a 100GB hard drive. For almost a year, I've had about 60GB used and about 40GB free. All of a sudden, My free space dropped to 12.4GB.
It seemed odd, so I decided to add up the folder sizes using right click, Get Info on all visible folders on my hard drive. According to my calculations, I should only be using about 30GB. This made no sense, so I'm thinking there are some hidden folders I wasn't adding up.
Next, I downloaded Whatsize, which calculated my total usage at around 27GB. Even stranger but it did corroborate my rough estimate.
I'm trying to determine why the bottom of my Finder windows say that I only have 12.4GB free when I should have a lot more than that.
I emptied that trash!
One more thing. I recently bought a Maxtor networked storage device and I backed up my entire hard drive onto it. I also bought a second iPod Nano.
Can anyone tell me what is going on?
Thanks

More like 5 GB free; you can improve matters somewhat by using the Installer's advanced options to install only the language(s) you actually use. Keep in mind that after updating, you still want to keep several GB free space on the HD to permit creation of the temporary disc files used in CD and DVD burning.
Also, check out Gulliver - Tiger Upgrade Guide

Free space on boot drive constantly decreases until reboot

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