Hard drive losing space rapidly.

I've noticed my hard drive filling up early today when i randomly opened the "get info" and watch my drive fill up by a few bytes every 30 seconds or so. Throughout the day I've lost about 30 MB of space on my hard drive. I don't know what's going on or how long it's been going on, but it's probably not a good thing. I'm using the old black macbook running snow leaopard.

If you actually meant 30MB (and not 30GB), that is virtually nothing. Even when you aren't doing anything, your system is performing tasks in the background. Many these may create temporary files. Depending on how much RAM you have installed, your system will also cache data to your hard drive. Little things like updating log files, etc... which also all happen in the background can eat up some space.
Again... this is assuming you actually meant 30MB. If you meant 30GB, we'll need to look into things a little further.

Similar Messages

Hard Drive losing space?

Lately, I've noticed that the "available space" on my G4 iBook's Hard Drive has been shrinking even though I have not installed any new programs or downloaded any huge files. I'm left with 6.81 Gigs available.
I was trying to figure out what was taking up all the space and I noticed the "Library" Folder in my Drive is larger than almost any other folder on the drive.
Library Folder 13.5 Gigs
System Folder (Leopard) 4.1 Gigs
Applications folder 12.74 Gigs
Documents Folder - 1.9 Gigs
Music - 6 gigs
Pictures 1.04 Gigs
Is this normal? My G4 iBook has a 60 Gig Drive (55.7 gigs actual) I have a 1.33 Ghz processor, with Leopard 10.5.6.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

HI,
Always good to keep an eye on available disk space.Right or control click the MacintoshHD icon on your Desktop, then click: Get Info. In the Get Info window, click the discovery triangle so it's facing down. You will see; Capacity and Available Make sure you have 10% available disk space, 15% is better. Insufficient available space, can cause performance issues, system corruption, and possible loss of data.
Leopard requires 9GB alone.
Since your music folder is about 6GB's, you might consider transferring those files to an external source like a firewire hard drive. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751
Leave your Library files as they are. They are system files your iBook needs.
Carolyn

Does iCloud drive use up hard drive storage space?

HI,
I want to save hard drive space and use iCloud Drive to store my documents, pictures etc. I have the iCloud drive folder set up in my finder. I have been copying and pasting data in there, but it seems whenever I do; the hard drive storage space decreases.
I thought the entire point of iCloud was to use cloud storage and not offline storage; unless you download it from the cloud to your hard drive. Why am I losing hard drive space?
Any help you can offer or suggestions would be very much appreciated

Hi FlyFalcon,
I am writing to say that I am having the problem you are worried about. I have a 121 GB MacBook with flash storage, and I am running out of room.
This is my work computer so I don't have any personal photos/music/movies stored on here. My iCloud drive has over 100 GB on it and it's driving this computer nuts! I am constantly getting the "your startup disk is full" message. As you can see from the screen shot below, it's saying I have 58.61 GB of photos on this computer, 25.84GB of movies etc...but all these files live on my personal MacBook at home.
I am paying for the $3.99 a month for 200 GB but I didn't get that iCloud would use up my HD space. So as a warning, 128 GB may not be enough for you.

Hard drive free space discrepancy

I have an 11 inch Macbook Air with a 120GB SSD and I am running OS X Lion 10.7.5.
Every so often I get messages indicating my hard drive is nearly full. Since it is a small hard drive I never thought much of it and just deleted a movie or two I put on it for when I travel. But lately I realized that I keep all my music, photos, and bulk of my movie files on an external drive, so there really isn’t much on my computer.
When I add up all the files listed under My Mac HD in the finder, I get 62 GB. Add in the operating system and I come up with 75 GB of the SSD used. When I look at the storage summary on “About this Mac”, it says I am using 94 GB. There is about a 19 GB discrepancy. Does anyone know what could cause this and where 19 GB of data can be hiding?
Hard drive free space discrepancy

Use a tool like OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 to find what's on the disk, where, and how large.
Freeing Up Space on The Hard Drive
1. See Lion's Storage Display.
2. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
3. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
4. Also see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
5. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
6. See The Storage Display.
You must Empty the Trash in order to recover the space they occupied on the hard drive.
You should consider replacing the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.

Help, losing hard drive free space after removing A3

This one has me scratching my head.
I've been through all the insanity of trying to get A3 up and running and have decided to give up until Apple gets their act together.
So I restored my startup drive from a SuperDuper back-up (pre A3) that does have A2 on it. All my A2 libraries, vaults and original RAWS reside on separate drives. Normally this leaves me with 390 +/_ GB of free space on my startup drive. However over the past 2 days since restoring to my pre A3 state I've noticed background drive activity (Activity Monitor shows kernel_task/root making consistent writes to the drive) and my free space has been gradually declining to where it is now shown at 328 GB.
I did a fresh install of OS10.6.2 and have run directory rebuilds, repaired permissions and Spotlight turned off.
It's almost as if A3 were still trying to do it's drive eating thing (technical term).
Can anyone enlighten me about what may be happening?
Thanks!
Bob

This happened to me as well.
TechTool actually crashed a hard drive big time by filling it to the brim with daily backup files.
It is supposed to keep only the 5 most current and delete them oldest first.
I disabled the backup function (TechTool Protection) which is found in the OS X System Prefs.

External hard drive losing free space

Hi,
Having replaced my MacBook's stock 80 GB hard drive, I purchased a FireWire drive enclosure so I could continue to use it as a backup drive. I back up my home folder manually, since I don't feel the need to purchase backup software. Recently I've noticed that deleting files on the external drive does not free up the previously-occupied space. Thus, the drive (which is shown to have 74.21 GB of total space) seems to have only 16.28 GB of free space, while both Get Info and du say that only 28 or 29 GB are being used. I'm not sure what the problem could be, or what my next steps should be. Any ideas/solutions?
Thanks in advance,
Larry

Oh wait, never mind. I had checked .Trashes from the Terminal, but usually I had ls set up to display "/" after any directories. There had been one entry in .Trashes, "501", without a slash afterwards. I had thus assumed that this was just a file. I came back after posting and figured I'd run a du on .Trashes and discovered that "501" was in fact a folder of some sort that contained 29 GB of deleted files! After deleting this folder, my drive's free space is now correct.
Thanks,
Larry

Internal Hard Drive Free Space Issue

Hey,
I recently upgraded my 17" MacBook Pro from Tiger to Snow Leopard but the upgrade seems to have created a number of problems, the most notable being the lack of free space now available on my internal hard drive.
I also had to install a trial version of Aperture 3.0.3 in order to access my aperture library as the older version of Aperture is not compatible with Snow Leopard.
At this point the free space available on my internal hard drive was 36GB and my aperture library was 39GB. I had to uninstall Photoshop Elements 9 in order to create enough free space to open this library.
I bought an external hard drive and after some organising (importing and exporting to and from external hard drive), I eventually moved all photo files/folders, projects and libraries onto this external drive, leaving only one in-progress project (about 3GB) left on the internal volume.
I also exported my iTunes library and any other files to this external drive.
All trashes have been emptied.
The problem is that, despite all this clear-out, I now only have 2GB of free space on the internal hard drive.
I ran Disk Inventory X and it shows that my home folder is using 155GB of space, which seems ridiculous considering there is in effect nothing left on my laptop save for the application programs and the one remaining project.
I have manually checked through this folder and all its subfolders and have found nothing that would accumulate to this amount of space.
I have repaired an issue with the internal volume, but it is now showing a “minor” problem with the volume header.
If someone can provide and explanation/solution to this I would be very grateful as it is severely slowing my workflow at the moment.
Thanks

Baresi:
I suggest that you begin with Repair Disk
Insert Installer disk and Restart, holding down the "C" key until grey Apple appears.
Go to Installer menu (Panther and earlier) or Utilities menu (Tiger) and launch Disk Utility.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in the left panel.
Select First Aid in the Main panel.
(Check S.M.A.R.T Status of HDD at the bottom of right panel, and report if it says anything but Verified)
Click Repair Disk on the bottom right.
If DU reports disk does not need repairs quit DU and restart.
If DU reports errors Repair again and again until DU reports disk is repaired.
If DU reports errors it cannot repair you will need to use a utility like Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior
I recommend that you make sure that you make a bootable clone of your entire volume using a utility like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.
You should also seriously consider installing a larger capacity drive.
cornelius

How do I find out the hard drive memory space on a 2006 MacBook?

Hey guys, so I have a MacBook that is running IOS X 10.6.8 and is a 2006. I have been wondering how to check your hard drive space since I bought it on Craigslist. I just want to verify how much space this thing has. And also, since i'm 15 i'm looking to save some moey on a new battery and was wodering if anyone can guide me through buying a new one on eBay. Thanks!!

To see how much room you have on your hard drive right click (Control key + Click) and select Get Info from the drop down menu.and check Available.
If you have an Early 2006 White or Black plastic MacBook with the removable battery you can get a new third party battery fairly cheap on eBay. Every MacBook from 2006 through Mid 2009 except the Late 2008 Aluminum Unibody use the same battery.
Black Batteries http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=macbook+black+battery&_sacat=0&LH_BIN=1&_sop=12 &_dmpt=Laptop_Batteries&_odkw=macbook+white+battery&_osacat=0&_trksid=p3286.c0. m 270.l1313
White Batteries http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=macbook+white+battery&_sacat=0&LH_BIN=1&_sop=12 &_dmpt=Laptop_Batteries&_odkw=macbook+black+battery&_osacat=0&_trksid=p3286.c0. m 270.l1313
Or for $129 from The Apple Store http://store.apple.com/us/product/MA566LL/A?mco=MTY3ODQ5OTY

Hard drive "free space"

I had a new hard drive installed and my original ghosted over. The drive is guid formatted and now has about 120 gigs of "free space" that I can't seem to touch. If I try to reboot from my orginal drive in an external inclosure via firewire it always bounces back to the installed drive thus not allowing me any use of DU. The "Free space" is just sitting there when i open DU with no way of accessing. When i select it in the partitions tab all is greyed out and is says it is guid.
I would like to boot from my original now external and just reformat and restore but I've tried usb w/ the 5volt as well as a fire wire and have been unsuccessful holding alt or choosing in preferences. It always bounces back to the installed drive.
Thoughts anyone?

If the original drive was taken out, put in an externan FW enclosure and not altered in any way, you should be able to boot from it instead of the new internal drive. Plug it in, power it up, reboot the Mac and press the Option key before the startup sound. A screen will appear from where you can choose the external drive: since both will probably have the same name, guide yourself with the icons to distinguish the external from the internal.
Once that's done, you should clone the external drive into the internal so you are able to use the full available space. Download Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner to carry out the cloning process, selecting to erase/reformat the internal drive at the start. You could do the cloning using Disk Utility, but it will be significantly slower.

Photo, hard drive, memory space

to free space on my mac bbok i want to send my photos to the cloud or a hard drive and , still be able to see them in iphoto (Updated)

Old Toad & Kappy both answered this question in the original post.

False Hard Drive Available Space Reading

Yesterday, I was adding a partition to my hard drive. i was going to create "Macintosh HD_2". i had 90GB left on my 160GB hard drive and the partition i was creating was about 70GB. Halfway through the partitioning process, a message prompted that my mac needed to be restarted. After restarting... i opened a finder window and there was only one disk image "Mactinosh HD". there was no HD_2. here comes the frustrating part... my macintosh HD has only 20 GB of free space left, almost as if there was a partition taking up the other 70GB... but, like i said, the other disk image is nowhere to be seen. this isn't the first time this has happened, when i had OS 10.5.1, i tried to do the same thing, with the exact same results. when apple released OS 10.5.2, it fixed the problem. I dont really want to wait for 10.5.3 for this to be fixed... Any ideas?

Does Disk Utility still show your total hard drive capacity as 160 GB, or does it show it as being 70 GB or so smaller? If it still shows as 160 GB, then it looks like the partition you attempted to create may have created some sort of file that is taking up space. If your total hard drive capacity has changed to 90 GB (160 GB - 70 GB), then it would seem that you have created a partition that you cannot see.
Assuming that your drive still shows as 160 GB, you can try to see what is taking up the space by using WhatSize or Disk Inventory X:
http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/
http://www.derlien.com
Disk Inventory X if free. WhatSize used to be, but there is a small charge now.
One of these should be able to tell you what is occupying 70 GB.
Also, it's good practice to keep 15%-20% of your hard drive free for best operation of the OS. 20% of 160 GB would be 32 GB. Your partition would have left just 20 GB. Don't know, but this might be part of the problem.
Good luck!

Question regarding Hard Drive Disk Space

I have a MacBook. only had it about 6 months ( a new Apple convert ) .... I upgraded to a 250 GB hard drive and keep my iTunes library on it. I noticed a performance change recently and discovered I was almost out of disk space. I have managed to free up approx. 7 GB but I continue to get that rotating beach ball icon much more often than ever before. I'm also noticing odd behaviors regarding my video... for example, if I click my desktop and do a click/drag, I everything suddenly is outlines and highlighted. This also occurs randomly on websites when I select something.
I thought perhaps the video issue could be caused by apps I've downloaded, but the only thing I've added recently was a program called iSale ( for eBay listings ) and a few iPod Touch applications from the Apps store.
Is 7 GB of free disk space insufficient, or would freeing up more space help ??
Thanks !
Chuck

7GB is way too low for a drive that size. you should have at least 25% of drive space free. you are undoubtedly suffering from disk fragmentation which can cause all sorts of issues. also you should check the integrity of your file system as it can easily be damaged because of low disk space. "run verify disk" in disk utility and if it reports any errors start from the install DVd and repair the drive (you can't do it while booted from the same drive). also, you need to free up some space and defrag the drive. one easy way to defrag is to clone your drive to an external then boot from the external and clone it back. ultimately you need either a bigger internal or an external to keep a lot of your data.

Hard Drive used space.

In Finder:
Macintosh HD Info:
I get Used: 40.28 GB on disk.
In Disk Utility:
Partition - Volume Information
Size: 231.93 GB
Available Space: 181.17 GB
(So Used?: 49.96 GB)
Roughly one says 40 GB used and the other 50 GB used
Why is that?

I have tried everything except Whatsize, also make sure those maintenance scripts run between 03.15 and 05.30 or on wake up. Also the one that runs at 00.30 if the Mac is ON.
Just had the idea of checking an external drive with a partition with SuperDuper bootable clone on it. There is still a difference between the two 'Used' readings but it is less. Difference is about 5 GB instead of 10 GB.
It doesn't matter in the sense that it's not doing any harm and I have masses of spare hard drive space. Might have a go at Whatsize or similar some time as long as it doesn't cost anything.
Thanks.

Hard Drive Disk Space

My 80gb HD on my macbook is getting extremely full, due mainly to the fact that i have a bunch of movies and music. The simple solution would be to delete some movies and music, but i would rather not. Any tips on freeing up some space?
Also, while trying to free up some space i downloaded a program called WhatSize. It tells me where the mosk disk space is used. One of the places using alot of space is something called private which is using 3 gb of disk space. Inside it are 2 sub titles, var and etc. Var holding the majority of the 3gb. Any idea what this is, if its needed, or how to delete it?

Works fine. I use two different libraries. I have one I keep on my MacBook that I use when I'm not hooked to the external hard drive. I keep just what I listen to the most on it.
The second library I have set up with all of my music on my external drive. That way I an start iTunes with either library depending on the situation.
This way I don't have my music duplicated on both drives. The bulk is on the external. I also keep a few movies on my MacBook and the rest on the external. Same situation. I have some in one library and the others in the external.
Mort

Hard Drive connected - Space Available never goes down when deleting files?

I have tried 2 different USB drives connected to the new airport N router.
Both drives work fine, an 80 GB maxtor, then replaced it with a 500GB usb seagate drive. Both drives have the same problem.
I only hook one drive up and copy over files to the drive. The space available shows up fine, but when I delete any files, the space available never goes down.
Any ideas how to fix this or is this just a nice big glitch?

Anyone with a hard drive connected to the N router.
Just copy some files the drive, then delete them while watching space available. The space available never goes down. What gives? Anyone else seeing this problem?

Hard drive losing space rapidly.

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