Hard drive space disappearing

Ever since my Time Capsule has stopped working [which is a separate issue (it says it has become a 'read only' drive)] my hard drive space on my mac book pro has been disappearing into thin air. I went from 15 GB of free space down to 584 MB in less than a week, without me adding a thing, to my knowledge. I know this is vague, but has any one ever heard of an elusive disk space devourer? Help!

Use Disc Inventory X to scan the hard drive and see what's taking up all the space. It's possible some log file has gone haywire and is writing/filling the disc.

Similar Messages

Hard drive space disappeared after starting to us iDisk

Before I started using iDisk I had about 80 G of hard drive space. Now I have 7 G!
I have followed other threads and I have checked the Volumes folder and find my home folder there, the iDisk and my external drive.
If I try to delete any of them I get a message that says I don't have the permissions.
I have decided to trash iDisk. How do I get rid of it and get my drive sapce back?
Help!
Deanna

the default on my iMac was to auto-back the Macintosh HD to iDisk daily. Well, the HD had about 57 Gb of stuff on it, and the iDisk allows a max of 1 Gb, and even if you pay more, you can only get up to 4 Gb. So, the program copied to the iDisk icon on my desktop. Lost 57 Gb of space ovennight. Finally found out that its a good thing to back up (to your online iDisk acct) a few things that you want to keep. I had a tech walk me through. First, if everything is still as it was on your HD, delete the copied HD from the iDisk desktop icon. Then, you can either DL huge files (like your whole HD to some disks, or in my case, I had a freestanding 100 Gb harddrive, so I used it for the target, and backed up EVERYTHING. Now when I perform a backup, it doesn't add much-just whats new or changed.

Macbook Pro hard drive space disappearing

I updated my OS to Mountain Lion when it came out, and have not had any issues, except for this. My hard drive space is disapperaring. After the updrade to Mountain Lion, I had close to 60 GB of free space on my hard drive, today I have about 47. Thing is, I haven't added anything to the hard drive, in fact, I've deleted a bunch of files. My Macbook is backed up to a 500 GB Time Capsule, and I have another 1 TB Time Capsule, where I store my media. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

Thank you for the info, but the Time Capsule isn't making snapshots. Here is what the storage is showing. I moved some pictures off of the hard drive, but they were there prior to the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Here is the screenshot with the storage breakdown...What would other be?

Disappearing Hard Drive Space After Yosemite Update

After installing OS X Yosemite my hard drive space has dwindled to basically nothing, rendering my computer useless. I had at least 50 gb (maybe more) of hard drive space before updating from mavericks to yosemite. Now, after using my computer for 30 mins or less I get an error message saying that my storage space is low. After a restart I will get about 600 mb of storage but then the cycle repeats. Since I have upgraded to Yosemite I have not saved or downloaded any large files but there is a significant amount of storage space (104 gb) used in the other category. It is not consistent with my usage. I initially had file vault encryption turned on but I thought maybe that was the cause of my disappearing hard drive space so I turned file encryption off and still no luck.
Please Help!
Problem description:
Hard drive space disappearing after installing OS X Yosemite.
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You are too low on drive space for iDVD to run properly. It is recommended that you try to have about 15-20 GB free for the application to run. See if you can delete anything to free up more space. Or, move more of your files to your external drive. iDVD needs to be on your computer's drive, so don't move it, or any of the iLife applications to your external drive.
You can create iMovies on an external drive, move your entire iPhoto and iTunes libraries to external drives, but I find iDVD works better if I create its projects on my main drive. I save all of my iDVD projects as disk image files and then move those files to my external drive for saving my projects. This allows me to delete the original iDVD project and the original iMovie project used in it, which gives more free space on my drives.

Hard Drive space issue

I was wondering if anybody has been experiencing hard drive space disappearing slowly? After a month I am down to 35 gigs when I haven't installed anything. I have deleted my cache every time I get off the internet and it still has the problem. The issue is occuring on a MacBook Pro.
Help!
Thanks

There are a number of possible explanations. While you may haven't installed software you've been using your computer and creating files which takes up space. If you have an iOS device perhaps you've been taking pictures and are using PhotoStream - so your pictures are now on your computer. You are using email and it is being indexed even if you aren't copying messages to the computer plus attachments are being copied to the computer. Also your operating system and programs create cache files - temporary files - which don't always get deleted (more on this later) and create log files. All this takes up space. Oh, and when you trash something don't forget to empty the trash. (Look under File in the Finder menu - the trash doesn't get automatically deleted.)
The cache files I mentioned above should get trimmed and deleted but they don't always. Sometimes a cache just keeps growing and growing until it takes over the computer. It isn't common but it does happen. Every once in a while I'll restart in Safe Mode - that done by restarting the computer and holding the shift key until the Apple icon appears. This performs a disk directory check (which is a good thing to do once a month or so or any time you force quit the computer) and it also deletes and trims cache files. Once you've gotten to the Finder restart as normal.
If you are using TimeMachine to back up your computer, by default you also have mobile backups running. When your computer isn't connected to its TimeMachine drive the hourly backups are made to the local hard drive instead. Mobile backups are intelligent - when the space on your drive dips down to 20GB older mobile backups are deleted to keep that 20GB free space the OS needs. Eventually if the drive continues to fill up with your stuff and there's no room for mobile backups they are deleted entirely and no more made until/unless you delete some of your stuff.

HELP PLEASE!!! My hard-drive space is disappearing!!! Over 300GB gone!!!

Hello, I'm a relatively new mac user and I am extremely frustrated right now... My hard-drive space is disappearing at an alarming rate. This problem has already crashed my computer once. I paid $128 to have it fixed by an apple tech. (So I thought) I paid almost $2000 for this thing and it may as well have been a ******* paper weight the majority of the time i've had it! ....My neighbor ran a "utility tool" of some sort called "i defrag", and it shows a file with 269 GB of stuff on it and fragmented like 93,000 times, called..... File name: iNode4949348 Path: /HFS+ Private Data/ ......This must be the problem file. However, this file cannot be found anywhere that I can see in the Finder. Please help... I need my computer and if it crashes again, I'm screwed, as I don't have the funds to repair it. I only have like 27GB left and at the rate it's going that means I will crash tonight or in the morning! PLEASE HELP!!!

Run whatsize and then delete the huge file.

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 space literally disappearing while I watch...

Hi there-
I'm wondering what is going on... I can literally watch my hard drive space tick down to nothing. I keep clearing and seconds later it starts ticking down again to nothing until everything is unable to run.
Where should I start with this?
Thanks in advance!
--Jeff

Hi Allan-
Hard to say what the free space was... It literally changed every couple of seconds until I had nothing left. (ZERO).
I cleared my iTunes library to give it about 40 gb of space - and it's doing okay now - or so it seems.
I have 3.5 GB of RAMM (physical) in the machine.
Weird... Any ideas?
Thanks!
--Jeff

New User Account has No Hard Drive Space

I also have a different problem and started a thread here. It was that thread that lead me to start this new one.
One of the people helping me there suggested I make a new user account and see if that solved my problem. I made two new user accounts, one a 'standard' and the other an 'administrator.' In both cases the new user accounts have no hard drive space, and no download or document folder in the dock.
Logging out of either of those accounts and back as myself (administrator) I have 410 gb of free hard drive space.
Any thoughts on what could be happening or how to resolve? My hard drive recently disappeared so I took it in to a Mac Genius and under AppleCare the hard drive was replaced. I did a full restore from Time Machine and have repaired permissions countless times since then and also run DiskWarrior. Repair Permissions returns a message that Apple has posted can be ignored; no other issues. DiskWarrior found two errors related to directory structure and repaired/replaced them. Other than my original problem and this new one regarding the new user accounts having no hard drive space my system runs fine.
I am running Mac OS X 10.5.5.

Sorry I wasn't clear in the first post. On my way into work today I started thinking it may be time to start over as well. You mentioned archive and install - would a clean install be better (I know it will be longer)?
Also, just for clarification - when I did a Full Restore from Time Machine was that the same as say restoring from a program like SuperDuper (that clones the hard drive)?
My thinking on this is if I do clean install, I should not restore from Time Machine if the structure carries over. That could be what is causing these problems. Instead I should back up my iPhoto and iTunes libraries via the built in back-up (to an external hard drive or DVDs), back up any documents, etc. and then really start over. Do a clean install, then reload 3rd party software from the original disks and restore the iPhoto and iTunes libraries, etc.

Freeing up hard drive space

I am trying to figure out how to free up space on the mac hard drive. If my iTunes library is backed up to an external hard drive, can I delete the library from the mac hard drive? How would I re-map iTunes so it launches from the external drive?
Next question: I store all of my photos on 2 external drives, but does the mac store a copy of the photos as I am editing them in Photoshop? Would love to understand how to clean this up, as I am down to less than 1GB of space on the mac.

How would I re-map iTunes so it launches from the external drive?
Hold down the option key while starting iTunes. Select the different library. Note, your external drive will have to be on when starting itunes in the future or else it will make an empty library on your drive.
Next question: I store all of my photos on 2 external drives, but does the mac store a copy of the photos as I am editing them in Photoshop? Would love to understand how to clean this up, as I am down to less than 1GB of space on the mac.
I don't use Photoshop but it isn't unusual for applications to make temporary buffers when editing files. I don't know if you can or would want to disable that.
1GB is seriously low. You should probably have 15+ GB free.
[Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html]
*Reading on hard drive space issues*
[Erasing free space results in erroneous full disk warning|http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=459623&seqNum=9]
[Where did my disk space go?|http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243 ]
[X-Lab: Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html]
[Amazing Disappearing Drive Space|http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html]
[Increase HD Free Space|http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd free-space-laptop.html]
[How to free up my disk space|http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html]
[Baby Boomer's Apple Discussions post|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10189607#10189607]
*Utilities for investigating drive space usage*
[Disk Inventory (free)|http://www.derlien.com>
[OmniDiskSweeper (free)|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download>
[WhatSize|http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize> (now shareware and only useful on <20GB drives until you buy it)
[GrandPerspective|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net>

What is taking up hard drive space?

hello.
I have a power mac (pre intel) quad core desktop running 10.5.8.
I have noticed it being very sluggish lately.
From taking 5 minutes to boot up, to browsers taking longer to launch(with the color wheel spinning longer until the browser is fully ready), to inputing text into fields in a browser window(the text gets entered a second or two after typing). Even when I open a finder window, the icons for every file, as well as the size listing of each file/folder will take like 10 seconds to start loading one at a time. I never noticed that before.
So I opened disk utility, and noticed that I have filled up 160GB out of the 233GB that this hard drive has. That seemed like a really high number.
So I added up the total size of the home folders in all 4 users on this computer, and they add up to 27GB. The system folder is 4 gigs, and the main Library folder at the top level is 51 gigs. I don't think there is anything left. That adds up to 82GBs. Where is the other 78GBs coming from?
I know I'm missing something, but I can't figure out what.
Even still, I don't know that this is the reason for my computer to act sluggish, but now I'm curious how I'm filling up so much hard drive space.
Any thoughts on finding this info out, and/or fixing the sluggish issue?
Thanks!!

On the space issue, has everybody emptied trash? You each have your own and if somebody doesn't... There's varous utilities for scanning drives for space usage. Some are free, others not. I think Omnidisksweeper is free. Search the Discussions for this subject and the others will probably be mentioned.
A few GB are kind of hidden and not accounted for, I think. Some cache files, etc.
160? I mean only 160? That's peanuts by modern standards.
Slow computer. Might start by verifying hard drive with Disk Utility. Installing and using Applejack would be good too. Are you sure everybody is logged out and didn't leave a ton of applications running in their account?
I'm too lazy to remove the old formatting from my boilerplate post on this:
*Quick checks*
Have you emptied the Trash?
*Reading on hard drive space issues*
[Erasing free space results in erroneous full disk warning|http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=459623&seqNum=9]
[Where did my disk space go?|http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243]
[X-Lab: Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk|http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html]
[Amazing Disappearing Drive Space|http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html]
[Increase HD Free Space|http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd free-space-laptop.html]
[How to free up my disk space|http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html]
[Baby Boomer's Apple Discussions post|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10189607#10189607]
*Utilities for investigating drive space usage*
[Disk Inventory (free)|http://www.derlien.com/]
[OmniDiskSweeper (free)|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/]
[WhatSize|http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/] (now shareware and only useful on <20GB drives until you buy it)
[GrandPerspective|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/]

Need help finding lost hard drive space on my Power Mac G4

I have a Power Mac G4 that is just about out of hard drive space. Why? I have no idea. I only have about 7 MB left of the 512 MB that came on the machine. I have backed up most pictures, documents, etc... to an external hard drive and have barely anything left on the desk top. Does anyone know what might be working 'behind the scenes' to eat up hard drive space or what I can do to gain any back? I'm not a huge 'techie' so any advice past 'empty the trash' would probably be helpful.
Thanks very much for anything you can do for me.
Tony

I believe you mean GB instead of MB when referring to hard drive size/space.
Look at these links.
Where did my disk space go?
http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum38&Number=770243
Download & use WhatSize described in this link or Disk Inventory X @ http://www.derlien.com/
Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html
Amazing Disappearing Drive Space
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html
Increase HD Free Space
http://macosx.com/forums/howto-faqs/275191-how-easily-increase-hd-free-space-lap top.html
How to free up my disk space
http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
Where Did My Disk Space Go?
http://www.macfixitforums.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/770243/site_id/ 1
 Cheers, Tom

Loss of Hard Drive Space

I'm running a macbook pro (mid 2009) 10.8.2 OSX. Ever since I upgraded the OSX my hard drive space is rapidly diminishing. I have 160 gig of space, but as of this morning it shows only 24.6 gigs are available. I've tried to locate where the 140 gigs of files are but cannot locate. I have approx 9 gigs in the library, 11 gigs in pictures no music (kept on an external) and 9G in applications. Any suggestions where the remaining 110 gigs could've disappeared to? And how I can get it back? The computer has really started running slow over the last few days as well.
Cheers,
Doc

First, empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space. According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB free for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. Use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved. ODS can't see the whole filesystem when you run it just by double-clicking; it only sees files that you have permission to read. To really see everything, you have to run it as root. Back up all data now if you haven't already done so. No matter what happens, you should be able to restore your system to the state it was in at the time of that backup. Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways: ☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.) ☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens. ☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens. After installing ODS in the Applications folder, drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. When you're done with it, quit it and also quit Terminal.

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!

I have a new Windows tablet computer with limited hard drive space, and cannot transfer my itunes library to the hard drive. Can I run t media from an external hard drive? If so, how do I transfer my files?

I have a new Windows tablet computer with limited hard drive space (32 GB), and cannot transfer my itunes library to the hard drive. Can I run itunes from an external hard drive? I have tried to follow some of the directions on this site, but am having no success. Thanks.

iTunes will run fine with the media on an external drive.
However, I suggest that a tablet computer with a tiny hard drive is not ideal as the primary computer for managing an iTunes library, even a small one. If you have another machine, perhaps a big, boxy, inexpensive old desktop with a decent amount of storage, that might be a better choice.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

Hard drive space disappearing

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