Hard drive is mysteriously filling up

My expansion hard drive is mysteriously filling up. It has 465GB of capacity. I am told I only have 85 GB left. When I open the Get Info for every top line file in the directory, I am told I have only used less than 100 GB.. I cannot find what is taking up the other space. If you have any thoughts on how to check or why this is happening, please let me know.
Thank you,
Larry

Hi Larry
Try OmniDiskSweeper. It will give you a more accurate and thorough picture of your hard drive.
Matt

Similar Messages

Please Help! Hard drive problem "Mystery Gb Space"

I recently ripped a lot of CD’s into itunes, so much that I filled up my hard drive. I cleaned up my music by deleting music I didn’t need. I also burned a majority of music to CD so that I could delete it off my hard drive. I have a 80gb hard dive; I freed up 20gb of space. I did not secure the trash when I deleted the music files. So for a while I had 20gb of free space, but a few days ago I looked at my istat pro and noticed that I now have a full hard drive again. I have not ripped any CD’s, downloaded any thing, or done any thing that would take up this much space. I contacted apple but all they would help me with was buying a plan. The only advice I was given was to secure trash. I would like to know where this “extra gb space” came from.
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Get "Disk Inventory X" (it is freeware.)
http://www.derlien.com/
It searches your hard drive and gives you a visual representation of all of your hard drive space usage. It seperates each file type into groups of colors etc so you can see where you have 15gb of mp3's and such. You can use it to open finder windows to those files. Just be careful not to delete any system files with it!
Also, you can save yourself about 7gigs right off the bat by deleting all of the sound files your computer comes with for garageband (unless you use garageband.) I know I don't, and I couldnt believe they ship these machines packed with almost 7 gigs of sound files that you may or may not use...

Low Memory Error (Computer also reporting that my hard drive is almost filled)

Is there a diagnostic tool or something else I can do to find out why I'm getting an low memory error?
I have a Compaq Presario CQ60. I have 4.0GB of RAM and a 2.0 GHZ processor.
I only have 5GB left on my hard drive. That can't be right! The drive is 285 GB total. What told me that I had a problem was when I removed 40GB of music that I ripped from my CD collection. I moved it off. It cleared up room on my HD until i rebooted it a few times. Then all 40GB were mysteriously gone. Program Files is 17.0 GB, MyDocuments 4.88GB, Music 5GB, Pictures 900MB, Videos 400 MB. Downloads folder 1.14GB. When i run Defrag from Windows 7 Home Premium, it fails.
I can't believe I've run out of memory or hard drive space. I think something else is going on. I've been using this computer for years and what I'm doing now is no where near as intense as I've done in the past.
Is there a tool i can download and run? At one time, my computer did restart and do a check on the Hard Drive sectors but it returned no errors. I don't know what to do.

Some very good tips here- includes tools to view what is using hdd space. (just be sure to ignore the ads)
http://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/
******Clicking the Thumbs-Up button is a way to say -Thanks!.******
**Click Accept as Solution on a Reply that solves your issue to help others**

My hard drive is getting filled by files in my ~/library/Cache/com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser folder.

I recently noticed that my hard drives free space was shrinking without my having created new files. I lost 4-10 Gb/day. There was no virus detected by Norton 2012. I checked the amount used at the root folder and found no significant increase. That lead me to believe there was something going on in the library. There is a huge folder in the library/Cache called com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser. There are 200K+ of files holding 49Gb of data in that folder. I know enough not to mess with anything in the library folders but what are they there for and why so many?
I had to rebuild my HD in Feb 2012 from clean installs and backups of data files so these iLifeMediaBrowser files are from less than 2 months ago.

Some very good tips here- includes tools to view what is using hdd space. (just be sure to ignore the ads)
http://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/
******Clicking the Thumbs-Up button is a way to say -Thanks!.******
**Click Accept as Solution on a Reply that solves your issue to help others**

My hard drive has mysteriously renamed itself

The hard drive item that sits permanently on my desktop has been renamed to 'pe. I noticed this yesterday evening, after I'd downloaded some software updates and tried to back up my files using Time Machine.
An image file that was saved on my desktop has also changed its name, from "Peter and Laura caricature" to "-09§". However, the name of a movie file saved on my desktop has remained the same, so whatever has caused these file names to change hasn't affected everything on my desktop (I only had three items there - the hard drive, the image and the movie).
Is this something I need to be concerned about? Does it signal some sort of corruption or virus? No-one else uses my machine.
I'd be very grateful if anyone out there could help me with this.
Best regards
Daniel

Hello db:
I am not going to turn this into a discussion about AV software. However, it is, IMHO, a complete waste of money and system resources to install AV software on a Mac running OS X. If one uses "reasonable" intelligence about downloads, there is minimal/no risk.
I wonder why a business would permit downloading music..... must be a very different business from ones I managed IT for in my previous life.
Barry

Mac OS 10.6.3 Server Hard Drive Space mysteriously disappears

Was wondering if anyone else has seen this issue. Every so often, my hard drive space on my server goes from about 60 GB available to almost nothing. I have revealed invisible files and do not see any that are hogging that space. I was wondering if it may be a cache file or some other anamoly I am not seeing? Once I restart the server, the space comes back. I do not know enough where to look or what to look for to "catch" this problem in action. I look on Console for messages and see some things happening there, but those messages do not appear to be the issue, but that comes from my limited knowledge.
This "seems" to have been happening since we upgraded to Retrospect 8. It never worked correctly with our tape drive, so I uninstalled and reverted back to 6.1.23. There may be some latent files still running in the background.

It should look somewhat like this:
xxxx% sudo du -x -h -d 1 /
Password:
24K /.fseventsd
1,9G /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.TemporaryItems
0B /.Trashes
0B /.vol
17G /Applications
9,0M /bin
0B /cores
4,5K /dev
1,2G /Developer
14G /Library
1,0K /net
0B /Network
10,0G /opt
4,4G /private
6,8M /sbin
4,0G /System
157G /Users <------ in this example this folder contains the most GB's
1,7G /usr
4,0K /Volumes
xxxG / <------ xxx GB : this is the total for all folders above.
So the results are presented one folder at a time in alphabetical order (?) with the total at the end.

Hard Drive will only fill half way

It sounds such a silly question but i can't seem to find an answer.
My hard drive became corrupted earlier this year, i had to do a clean install and add all my files from my Time Capsule.
Last week i was trying to update my iPhone and it said my Hard Drive was full. It's not even half full!!
It's not been partitioned as you can see by these screen shots.
I've tried to repair the disc but to no avail.

It is a strange problem.
, i had to do a clean install and add all my files from my Time Capsule.
Did you do that by booting OS X Recovery, and selecting Restore from Time Machine Backup, or did you add your files some other way?
Try the following. It may not fix the problem but it won't make anything worse.
Make sure a backup is not in progress, then rebuild the Spotlight database according to the following instructions: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes
(summary: drag the entire source volume to the exclusions list, click OK, then remove it by clicking the minus ("–") button.)
This will have no effect on any existing backups.

Hard-Boiled Hard Drive Replacement Mystery!

It was a wet and gloomy night in Frisco, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, when I finally pulled the trigger after a couple months of research and thought: I replaced my stock MBP HD with a Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black. But then, when I rebooted, all I saw was the light blue screen of death. The kind of blue that makes your stomach sick and fists clenched with anger. So here's the story:
1. I order WD Scorpio Black (WD3200BEKT) along with McNally FW External Enclosure from the fine folks at Newegg.
2. I put New HD in enclosure and clone my Orig HD using SuperDuper.
3. I check the clone by successfully booting to the New HD from the external FW enclosure. Works perfect, everything looks great!
4. I proceed to crack open the MBP to replace the drives, meticulously following the instructions from IFIXIT dot com, which i'm sure many of you are familiar with. Seems to go smoothly. No problems that I noticed.
5. I put MBP back together and power up. All I get is the light blue nothing screen. New HD (now installed in laptop) sounds like its whirring, but I wouldn't stake my life on it.
6. OK, so I boot up with my Leopard DVD sucessfully. I am also able to boot up successfully with my Orig HD which is now in my McNally FW external enclosure.
7. Disk Utility recognizes my New HD. It also shows up on the desktop.
8. Just for kicks, I hit "Repair It" (wrt New HD) and it goes through the motions and says my New HD "looks ok". Again, just for kicks, I have Disk Utility check permissions and even repair permissions. No sign of problems.
9. I try again. I go to Preferences --> Start Up Disk, choose my New HD (still installed inside the laptop) and again all I get is the initial light blue screen, nothing else.
10. I just leave it alone and eventually the screen displays the flashing File Icon With Question Mark thing (which brings back horrible memories of trying to bring back and old iMac G3 from the dead. A sickening shudder runs through me.) A few minutes later, my MBP finds the startup disk on my Orig HD (which is still connected via the FW enclosure) and boots up from that with no problems.
11. Again, thinking what the ****, I clone my Orig HD (now in external FW) to the New HD (now installed inside the MBP) again using SuperDuper. According to SD, clone goes fine.
12. I try to boot up again from New HD, same ole blue screen of nothing.
SO, Geniuses out there, or just part-time dics (detectives), what explains what to me is a mystery? And (please) is there a way to solve without having to crack the darn thing open again.
Many thanks in advance,
Casey

This is very mysterious indeed! Probably grasping at straws here, but did you name your new HD? And have you tried resetting the PRAM?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US
I've heard that it works best if you hold the keys down until the startup chime has sounded 3 times.
The internal drive connects through the Serial-ATA Device Tree and the external connects through a port. So there is some slightly different circuitry involved. It's probably a long shot that resetting the Pram would fix the problem, but it's easy enough to try.
Good luck!

External hard drive mysteriously disappeared.

My external hard drive (Firewire) mysteriously disappeared. I can get it to pop up in Disk Utility, but I can't get it to show on the desktop. I've tried it on a few Mac computers. Do you have any idea what happened?

That's very strange. I don't think I've heard of DU exhibiting that behavior before.
I presume the reason you don't want to erase the drive is that there is un-backed-up data on it, and that if you could recover that data you could either reformat (erase) or dispose of the drive.
You may want to try downloading and using the free demo version of one or more of these data recovery utilities:
Data Rescue II
FileSalvage
VirtualLab
In each case, the demo will show you what files the full version would be able to recover from the drive. You can then decide whether the files you could recover are valuable enough to justify buying the full version of the utility.

External Hard Drives Mysteriously Losing Read/Write Privileges...

I am currently running 10.5.8 OSX and for some reason all of my external hard drives are mysteriously losing their Read/Write privileges on my Mac Pro. I have not altered anything within my account or settings to my knowledge. I continue to have to unmount the drive, connect it to my MacBook Pro, reset the privileges, then re-mount to the Mac Pro to get it to Read Write. What could be causing this?

HI,
Try repairing disk permissions...
Quit any open applications/programs. Launch Disk Utility. (Applications/Utilities) Select MacintoshHD in the panel on the left, select the FirstAid tab. Click: Repair Disk Permissions. When it's finished from the Menu Bar, Quit Disk Utility and restart your Mac. If you see a long list of "messages" in the permissions window, it's ok. That can be ignored. As long as you see, "Permissions Repair Complete" when it's finished... you're done. Quit Disk Utility and restart your Mac.
Carolyn

Canvio backup hard drive filled?

I have a Toshiba Canvio portable hard (500GB)drive for backup. My computer has 75GB of information on it but my hard drive is nearly filled. How can this be? Do I have some setting incorrect? thanks

Try re-indexing Spotlight.
Spotlight – Re-index

IDVD filling up the hard drive

Hi !
I made a test in 4 new macs 2 new G5 an 2 new iMacs
I imported 2 jpeg pictures in imovie and started IDVD then started activity monitor.
After just a 30 sec the hard drive started too fill up (seen in activity monitor) and after 2-10 minutes the encoder server and the thumbnail server crashed (seen in activity monitor)
system 10.4.2(imac) and 10.4.4(PM) tried on iLife 05 and 06
What cold bee the problem ????

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1548797#1548797

ITunes consumed 90% of hard drive! Can't upgrade/sync my phone!

My immediate problem: I bought a 64GB 4S to replace my 16GB 3G. I've managed to do a proper backup of 3G on hard drive and have told iTunes to restore from backup onto 4S, but it is insisting on backing up the 4S first! There is no space left to do that so it starts, fails, and bombs out without doing a restore! Same applies trying to upgrade 4S to latest iOS 5 version. (Annoyingly it doesn't even check for adequate space on hard drive, it just fills it up 100% and doesn't erase the incomplete sync/backup data after bombing out!!!)
I changed phone companies when I got 4S and changeover took 3 weeks, so I installed music and apps on 4S while waiting, and I have much unique data etc on the 4S that I want to keep, otherwise I'd reset it first. But there's no room to sync it. I've bought DiskAid so I can get at the files on the 4S and that was working OK, but it also needs to sync to get some of the native data/files, and it puts its files where iTunes does, and now there's not enough room to use it either! So I'm stuck: I can't use 4S until I can restore. Can't do that without getting more hard drive space or erasing 4S. Can't erase 4S without getting data off first, but not enough memory. Can't make enough hard drive space because it's all taken up by iTunes data and I don't know if it can be moved/deleted and how safe it is to try.
Suggestions?
Option 1: find another way to get data off iPhone 4S
Option 2: find way to safely move iTunes data to drive F (2 TB) without making the backups unusable
Option 3: work out what iTunes data on drive C can be deleted
Option 4: ?
How do I control iTunes? Can I move the data, etc to another hard drive?
Background: iTunes keeps filling up my 120GB hard drive! I've been moving off all my large folders and files for months and now there's almost nothing left that I can take off and put somewhere else! We have 5 iPhones and an iPod using iTunes on PC, with many GB of tunes and 100-250 apps on each phone so the space used is huge!!!
Thanks!!!

First thing I'd suggest is cloning your hard drive to a larger drive. You'll continue to have problems running any hard drive that close to capacity. Don't want to do that?
Move your iTunes library to an external drive:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easiest-move-itunes-library-external-drive/
Change the iPhone backup path;
http://aaltonen.us/2011/01/03/change-the-location-of-your-iphone-backup/

Which Hard Drive for MacBook Pro 5,5?

Hi everybody!
I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 5,5 (13,3", 2.53GHz C2D, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD) from an iStore on December 2009. It was a Xmas present from me to myself. I use it mainly for music-video recording and editing with Logic Express, Final Cut X and Ampeg SVX; also have music and movies and other stuff, so I need the space AND memory. I'm not much of a gamer, but I do play some Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Tales from Monkey Island occasionally. I like developing apps for iPod/iPhone with Xcode, but I do that very seldom.
I want do upgrade RAM and HD.
RAM:
I'm going all the way for 8GB (2x4GB). I've read that the fastest that my Mac can handle is DDR3 1066GHz, so there is no point in getting DDR3 1333GHz right?
I'm going for these modules ---> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/8566DDR3S8GP/
Hard Drive:
I've filled up the factory 250GB drive. BTW, I have a 1TB Western Digital My Book Studio that I use for Time Machine and make a clone of my drive before any important upgrade just in case. I want to get a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive. So the question is which one of these three?:
Seagate Momentus XT ---> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/YST9500562AS/
Seagate Momentus ---> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/YST9500420AS/
Western Digital Scorpio Black ---> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/YWD5000BEKT/
I've heard that Western Digital makes the best hard drives out there and comparing the Scorpio Black with the Momentus the $20 extra and the 3 additional years in warranty sound like a good deal to me, since they are both equivalent (500GB 16MB 7200RPM). Now, talking about the Hydrid one, 32MB is noticeable? and 4GB of NAND memory will act like more RAM or super cache memory, I guess... I've read that is good for three things:
1. Booting up: That'll be great, but since I rarely boot up more than once a day, is it necessary?
2. Load frequently used apps: Also great, but I load everything I need and keep it in another desktop while not in use. Again, necessary?
3. Better performance?: Now, that's grrreat! If that is true, then the 8GB RAM + 4GB NAND will make my Mac noticeably faster, right? Then I'll go for it.
The thing is, with non-hybrid drives I've read that all you have to do is install the OS, copy you stuff and you're good to go. On the other hand, I've read a lot of bad things about this hybrid XT drive, stuff like it's unstable, you have to install a Firmware (how do you do that before installing the drive?), and even some guy using a jumper wire (what is that) to limit the drive's speed from 3Gb/s to 1,5Gb/s!!! (how the **** do I do that? is it really necessary?) And also good things as well, that the booting time is a LOT faster and also it's very fast at loading apps.
Well, I hope you can help me!
Thank you for reading
Cheers.
Walter
MacBook Pro 5,5 (13,3") Mid 2009; 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor; 4GB (2x2GB) RAM; Factory 250GB 54000RPM HD; OS X Lion 1.7.2
iPod Touch 3rd Generation 32GB; iOS 5

Did you ever get this solved? I am having a very similar problem. I haven't tried replacing the hard drive yet. When I boot into the Recovery HD, disk utility works fine and says the HD is fine.

Un-accounted hard drive usage

My Backup Hard drive keeps filling to capacity and my ststem drive grows in usage:
Hardware/Software description;
Mac G4 Dual Processor
OS 10.4.11
System hard drive 142.93 Gig Used space is 78.02 Gig
Backup hard drive (USB) 76 gig Backup Software Super Duper
About 2 weeks ago, when doing a backup, Tech Tool Pro 5 reported that the backup hard drive had only 2% space available. I purged a lot of no longer needed files/pictures, cache, internet files etc on my system hard drive. The result was now 48.76 gigs used. Wanting to do a complete backup, I formatted the backup USB hard drive and then did a complete backup. The result was that the backup hard drive showed 48.76 gigs, the same as the system drive.
Now roughly 2 weeks later I went to do a backup and Tech Tool 5 reported once again only 2% space available or 76 gigs used space on the backup hard drive.
Tonight I used 'Finder' then 'Get Info' on the system drive. It reported 78.02 Gigs.
I then did the same on the backup drive. It reported 76 gigs used.
Now here is the problem. In the past 2 weeks, I have not added any applications. I have not downloaded any pictures, I have not done anything to add significant files to the hard drive. My usage has been reading/sending email and reading a few forums I follow. So where did the extra 27.24 gigs of used space come from.
Tonight, using 'Finder' then 'Get Info' I clicked on each folder on my system drive and added up the size of each and every folder. My total was 58.39 Gigs, Yet
'Finder' and 'Get Info' shows my system hard drive as having 78.02 gigs. This time I have a difference of 19.63 gigs between Finder and Get Info on the system drive compared actual hand add of all space used.
What is filling up may hard drive and then filling up my back up hard drive when I do backups.
Thank You
Paul

Is there any way to do a BLANKET clean of the log files, or do you have to do a clean on each log file ?
Is there any other hidden files I should clean or erase that accumulate over time and steal disk space ?
Best way is to get Applejack...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15667/applejack
After installing, reboot holding down CMD+s, (+s), then when the DOS like prompt shows, type in...
applejack AUTO
Then let it do all 5 of it's things.
At least it'll eliminate some questions if it doesn't fix it.
The 6 things it does are...
Correct any Disk problems.
Repair Permissions.
Clear out Cache Files.
Repair/check several plist files.
Dump the VM files for a fresh start.
Trash old Log files.
First reboot will be slower, sometimes 2 or 3 restarts will be required for full benefit... my guess is files relying upon other files relying upon other files!
Disconnect the USB cable from any Uninterruptible Power Supply so the system doesn't shut down in the middle of the process.
It's a pretty small download Paul.
Is the App Omnidisksweeper designed to totally remove all unused files etc from my HD ?
Nope, you can delete things from within it, but mostly to find where it is the Disk space is used up.

Hard drive is mysteriously filling up

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