Harddrive space "disappearing" vitrually

Hi. I'm asking on behalf of my wife, who has a MacBook 2 GHz Core 2 Duo, from 2008. She's running 10.6.6.
Twice since yesterday she's had issues with her harddrive suddenly not having enough drive space. She began with 27gb os free space, was running Word, got an error from Word that there was not enough drive space to Save, and the computer says there's only half a gig of space left. She quits out of everything, reboots, and--BOOM--the 27gb is back.
The only other application running is Mac Mail.
I'm exploring if there could be a Word conflict or bug, but I figure I should post here, too, just in case you guys know of a Mac-related issue/solution.
Thanks!

Hi Stephen,
Run Repair Disk, and if that doesn't do it, try a Safe Boot.
First check the S.M.A.R.T. status on your HD: Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility>in the panel at left, select the first item in the list/your HD mechanism>look at the bottom of the main window next to S.M.A.R.T. status and see if it says “Verified” or something more ominous like “Failing.”
If S.M.A.R.T. status is "Verified," run Repair Disk: Boot from install disc (insert disc>restart>immediately hold down c key and keep holding it until you see “Preparing Installation”)>at first screen select the language and click Continue> click on the Utilities Menu in the menu bar>open Disk Utility>select your HD in the panel on the left side>click Repair Disk at bottom of main window. Run this at least twice, and keep running it until it says “appears ok” twice in a row. If that doesn’t happen, you may need a stronger utility such as DiskWarrior or if the directory is damaged beyond repair, you may need to reinstall the OS, or you may have a damaged HD (repair utilities can only repair the directory structure, not the HD itself). When this is finished, quit Disk Utility, quit the installer, and restart. Once booted normally, go to Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions.

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Why am I losing harddrive space?

I am a active editor and film geek so I often am moving any where from 20 to 200G's of space at a time as well as constantly downloading things for my projects. Somewhere I must have gotten a virus because I removed over 80G's from my harddrive and since have lost those 80G's and only have a fluctuating 600MB's now. I went through the processes and checked to see if something fishy was happening there. The most processing happening is in the Chrome Helper but that doesn't appear to be the root of the problem. I never set up my Time Machine so thats not the problem either. I used disk utility and now it says it can't repair the disk but all the other verifications work fine. It has been happening pretty regularly for the past 2 weeks. I keep removing heavy items and lo and behold the free space disappears. Also not sure if its linked but since this started happening my mail stopped working. HELP!

First thing I suggest is be sure you emptied your trash after all the deleting.
I use WhatSize to check space on my drive.
Disk Inventory X is also good for this.
The X Lab: Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk has some good information on what to look for when cleaning your drive.
Mort

Running out of harddrive space - here's a fix.

Twice now I've run out of harddrive space on my t500 with a 160GB harddrive installed. The first time I called the IBM support people who were as useful as a chocolate teapot.
This time I turned to the Microsoft forums and finally got it figured out. I don't know if this will get to IBM's tech guys, but perhaps they may want to look into it for their build.
Vista uses an amount of the drive for Restore points and shadow copies of files. Typically this amount is limited to 15% of the drive space. On my copy of Vista, the setting was UNBOUNDED, which is why it gobbled up the entire harddrive.
In XP, this setting was controlled by a UI, in Vista, MS took a huge step forward and implemented a command-line utility to ocntrol this setting. (/sarcasm).
These are the commands to list and set the amount of storage consumed by Vista for restore points and Shadow copies.
vssadmin List ShadowStorage
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /on=C: /For=C: /MaxSize=5GB
Note that I set mine to 5GB which is substantially less than the default 15% of the harddrive. If you use this, use your own discretion.
The question of course is why I received a system with this set as follows:
C:\Users\Mike>vssadmin List ShadowStorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.
Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{a589e9af-cf02-19dd-bec8-001c259b5bc3}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{a589e9af-cf02-19dd-bec8-001c259b5b
c3}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 6.656 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.108 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: UNBOUNDED
Not that I expect IBM will 'fess up, but what the hey.
Edit: My apologies for the random smilies, I couldn't find an option to turn of interpreting some character sequences as smilies.
Message Edited by mpbrede on 03-23-2009 01:03 PM

@mpbrede,
Thanks for the heads-up. Looks like I'm "safe" but this is sure a big chunk of drive space. T400, VB 64, 320G HD:
Shadow Copy Storage association
   For volume: (C\\?\Volume{ed7a5df2-9ee2-11dd-9c63-00218661ac77}\
   Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C\\?\Volume{ed7a5df2-9ee2-11dd-9c63-00218661ac77}\
   Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 26.467 GB
   Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 28.299 GB
   Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 44.494 GB
Z.
The large print: please read the Community Participation Rules before posting. Include as much information as possible: model, machine type, operating system, and a descriptive subject line. Do not include personal information: serial number, telephone number, email address, etc. The fine print: I do not work for, nor do I speak for Lenovo. Unsolicited private messages will be ignored. ... GeezBlog
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HD space disappearing

so, over the past couple of weeks the free space on my hard drive has been disappearing. I have 60 gigs on my hard drive. Three days ago i had 4.78 free, and now I have 600 mb. I have been downloading using azureus, but i have my preferences set to download directly onto the external drive (I have a 250 gig external drive and most of my files have been moved to there). Most of the files that remain on my hard drive are small documents, I have a small itunes library and a photo library (2.27 gig and 741.2 mb respectively). I will admit that i have a fairly large documents folder and desktop, (7.84 and 5.69 respectively) but nothing that i can think of that would fill up my space like this. It seems that when I download with azureus it fills up my hard drive, but i cannot find any of the files on my hard drive, they all exist, as they should, on my external drive. I should add that now it seems that even when i am not connected to the internet my space disappears, I am now at 540 mb!!!
I have already repaired the permissions on my HD and done some cleaning with OnyX... so i am at a loss...
Could i have a virus??
I am doing a scan with clamxav right now but it has not as yet come up with anything.
My next plan is to move everything i want onto the external and do a complete reinstall, does this seem logical??? I don't really look forward to this!!

If you're comfortable in Terminal:
1. Launch Terminal from: >Appications > Utilities
2. Enter this command (you can just copy and paste):
sudo du -cxhd 1 /
Hit return, then type your password (it is not echoed to the screen so type carefully) and hit return again. If you have never used the "super user do" command before you'll get a friendly little lecture.
This will display a list of all folders at the root level of the drive with their size in Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes and Gigabytes. This may take a while, be patient.
Look for very large folders.
Joe

Losing HardDrive Space for No Reason

Hello Everyone,
I'm in great need of help.I have a IMac G5 running Tiger that is losing HardDrive space everyday even when nothing is being loaded on the machine( almost a gig everyday)I saw on this message board where someone else had a similar problem and they suggested that they look in Finder Applications/Utilities Console and look for repeated lines in the log.Well I looked there and my log has entries every minute or so called "crashdump" .I mean for yesterday there are probably a 100 or so entries with this name (crashdump) .Is this normal ? Can I delete these ?Will that do any good? Is that even the problem?
MANY THANKS to anyone who could help,
Tracy

Is there any software or hardware you don't know for certain if it is compatible with your currently installed system? Just because it says it is compatible with:
10.2.x and up does not mean it is compatible with 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5.
nor does it mean that it is compatible with 10.2.3 and above.
Same with any version of compatibility listing. Only if software or hardware says it is compatible with your exact OS version, can you believe it has been tested with that OS version.
See my FAQ* for freeing up disk space as well:
http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Photoshop cs6 work space disappear when i trying to crop or lasso.

canvas size
width : 1600 pixels
height : 1600 pixels
resolution : 300 pixels/inch
When I trying to crop or lasso, my work space disappear.
there is one way to find work space. stop using crop or lasso tool.
i don't know why.
pls help me.
OS : Win 7 pro (64-bit)
Cpu : intel i5
VGA : Geforce 310
Ram : 8 gb

Update your graphics card driver or turn off OpenGL/ OpenCL usage under Edit --> Preferences --> Performance.
Mylenium

Drive space disappearing for no apparent reason. what could be causing?

As the subject says, I have an issue with space on my drive being filled by something throughout the day. If I restart, some but not all of the space willl come back and eventually I need to restart again because I'll have 0kb of available space. At that point, I can't get incoming mail, IMs etc. Any ideas as to what is going on? Any additional information I can give to help figure out the problem?
This morning I had about 600MB free, it dropped to 0kb in the afternoon, I restarted and it was about 480MB and iit was empty again this evening. If you "get info" on the drive you can watch the space disappear. Please help!
Thank you in advance

2ellas wrote:
This morning I had about 600MB free,
That's a disaster waiting to happen! You need to keep roughly 15% free at all times!
You need to delete some stuff immediately or you'll start losing data (if you haven't already), or worse!
See [Where did my Disk Space go?|http://web.me.com/pondini/AppleTips/DiskSpace.html]

The disk space disappears after bootcamp failed in deleting the windows partition.

Hardware: Macbook Pro 700
OS: Lion v10.7
1. I installed Windows 7 in my mac. The space of Windows partition is 80G.
2. Some dlls of Windows will always disappear and at last the Windows cannot be started successfully.
3. Yesterday I updated Lion and started the bootcamp to remove the Windows partition. But bootcamp throwed an error(I forget what the error is).
4. I started bootcamp again to try to remove the Windows partition, but there is only create Windows partition in the options.
5. I started the Disk Utilities and verified the disk. The reported result was that there were some errors in disk.
6. So I restarted the machine and pressed COMMAND+R and entered the Disk Utilities to repair the disk.
7. After repairing the disk, there are no errors in disk now. But 80G space disappears.
Now my whole disk is still 320G, but the mac partition is 238G.
How can I repair it? Please help me.
Some logs in system:
Mar 8 04:54:44 ko-hitoshimatoMacBook-Pro com.apple.kextd[10]: Error reconsidering volume /Volumes/BOOTCAMP.
Mar 8 04:57:25 ko-hitoshimatoMacBook-Pro fseventsd[18]: log dir: /Volumes/BOOTCAMP/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 399DDE3E-37D7-43A8-8BD1-049EF76C803F

Figured it out myself! I didn't have any ports open on my MBP for LAN access....
Bob

Disk Space Disappearing -- 10.2.8

I have a G3 PowerBook running OS X 10.2.8. I've noticed that my disk space disappears for some unexplained reason, although it does seem to happen most often after my daughter has been playing games on disney.com. Does anyone know how to pinpoint where the disk space is going, and more importantly, how to get it back? I've got an external hard disk and have moved lost of programs off of my Mac, but the gains are short-lived.
Thanks for any help/suggestions.

If you go to "more options" in the Search pane (upper right of this page) and enter "disney" and then search "all categories," you'll find other reports of "concerns" with visiting the Disney web site. Some are obviously just plain paranoia but such a search might be useful.
I've been rehabbing three old G3 PowerBooks for a friend who knew nothing about the Mac OSX maintenance scripts. On one machine, simply running one of the scripts freed up 2GB of space on his 8GB boot partition (the Wallstreet G3 PB has the "Old World ROM" OSX boot partition limitation).
To learn about this useful function, please refer to this article:
Running the Mac OS X maintenance scripts
The scripts run automatically but only if your computer is turned on and not sleeping in the wee hours of the morning. Obviously, 95 percent of Mac users won't benefit as their computer are either off or asleep at this time of day. The article shows how to run them manually.
There is a freeware program called "WhatSize" that reports what is eating up disk space but I've not been able to get it to run on a G3 PowerBook under 10.2.8, Seems to need Panther.
You might post which G3 PowerBook you have; this Apple article will help you identify yours:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24604

Something is eating up my harddrive space

Some application is eating up my harddrive space, its constantly decreasing every second, but i cant find out what the problem is. So can anybody help me diagnose the problem.
thanks
prathap

Actually, I ended up writing an article to help people find space eating files:
http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html
It lists the "usual suspects" then goes on to the somewhat more daunting process of using the Terminal to find and eliminate more esoteric files.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

30GB of space disappears on External Drive after failed DMG copy via USB

I have a 298.1 GB external Western Digital hard drive connected to my iMac by a USB 2.0 cable. It is formatted in NTFS-3G so I can use it with both my PC and Mac. Yesterday in Disk Utility I created a 50GB 256-bit encrypted DMG and told Disk Utility to save it on a folder in my external drive. It got to about 20GB and then my house's power went out. A few hours later when the power came back on, I turned on my computer, and the available space on my external hard drive went down from about 100GB to 68.21GB.
The first thing I thought was that the DMG transfer ended prematurely so I should just find and delete the incomplete DMG from the hard drive. So I went to the folder I saved it in and it was not there. I checked all the folders and I couldn't find any DMG in there. Then I went to the root of the external drive and used Get Info to find the space each folder took up. It adds up to 194.12 GB. So I subtracted 194.12 from 298.1 and got 103.98. If I'm supposed to have 103.98 GB, why do I only have 68.21 GB available? I double and triple checked the size of everything on the disk and I still should have about 30GB more than I do. The 30GB just disappeared.
I tried verifying the disk in Disk Utility and got:
2009-06-14 11:12:33 -0400: Verifying volume “SHADUSMEDIA”
Starting verification tool: 2009-06-14 11:12:33 -0400
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for LOG_LEVEL: 2
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for UBLIO_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for PROBE_DISABLED: 0
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for MOUNTRDISKSENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for NFCONV_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for ALWAYS_RECOVER: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: ntfs-3g script invoked with command line "/System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs-3g.fs/ntfs-3g.util" "-v" "/dev/disk1s1"
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Invoking user: MP
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: [Verify] Entering function Verify.
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: ** No NTFS file system checks have been implemented yet.
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: ** Reporting that the volume is fine without checking anything.
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: [Verify] Reporting that the volume is fine, even though that may not be the case (no fs checks performed).
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: [Verify] Returning from function Verify.
Verifying tool completed: 2009-06-14 11:12:42 -0400
So it appears that it's only telling me that it's fine without even checking. I then tried repair disk and got the error message:
2009-06-14 11:14:25 -0400: Verify and Repair volume “SHADUSMEDIA”
Starting repair tool: 2009-06-14 11:14:25 -0400
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for LOG_LEVEL: 2
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for UBLIO_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for PROBE_DISABLED: 0
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for MOUNTRDISKSENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for NFCONV_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for ALWAYS_RECOVER: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: ntfs-3g script invoked with command line "/System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs-3g.fs/ntfs-3g.util" "-y" "/dev/disk1s1"
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Invoking user: MP
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] Entering function Repair...
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] Marking volume to be checked at next Windows boot.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] "/usr/local/bin/ntfsfix" "" currently disabled.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: ** /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix has been disabled because of volume corruption issues.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: ** If you still want to try fixing your volume, use /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix from the command line...
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] Returning from function Repair with FSUR_INVAL.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400:
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Disk Utility stopped repairing “SHADUSMEDIA” because the following error was encountered:
Filesystem verify or repair failed.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400:
I tried restarting my iMac and disconnected and reconnecting the cable and that didn't work. I plugged it into my PC and it still says that all the files on my external drive add up to 194.12 GB. Which still means I should have 103.98 GB of free space instead of 68.21 GB.
So I'm stumped now and not quite sure what to do. Here is the information about the external drive from Disk Utility:
Name : SHADUSMEDIA
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk1s1
Mount Point : /Volumes/SHADUSMEDIA
File System : Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G)
Connection Bus : USB
Device Tree : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/USB7@1D,7
Writable : Yes
Capacity : 298.1 GB (320,070,288,384 Bytes)
Free Space : 68.3 GB (73,348,239,360 Bytes)
Used : 229.8 GB (246,722,048,512 Bytes)
Number of Files : 145,472
Number of Folders : 0
Owners Enabled : Yes
Can Turn Owners Off : No
Can Repair Permissions : No
Can Be Verified : Yes
Can Be Repaired : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : No
Supports Journaling : No
Journaled : No
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 1
You can see on there it says I've used 229.8 GB, when I've actually only used 194.12 GB. Here are the specs from System Profiler for my iMac:
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM51.0090.B09
SMC Version: 1.8f2
Serial Number: QP6450GKVUX
I'm running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6. If you need any more information just ask, I'd really like to get my 30GB back. Thanks in advance.

Can anyone help?

The contents of Spaces disappears after long inactivity!

OS X 10.7.2, 10 virtual spaces with assigned apps accessed as Ctrl1-Ctrl9. Everything’s definitely fine as long as I keep switching between them. If spaces are not accessed fro a certain (? maybe 30 minutes, maybe 2 hours - unknown), their contents... auto-disappears! Switching to a space results in a blank wallpaper, with the upper menu (near the Apple logo) containing the name of the recent app you just switched from. Mission Control would demonstrate all spaces abandoned >1 hour ago as empty! No minimized windows (as long as the Expose for the app cannot be shown - we are not in that app yet! The space “forgot” about the app being there), nothing.
Apps are demonstrated in the Dock as active, in the Application Switcher (e.g. Cmd+Tab) as running, and whenever summoned by clicking through either of these ways (or through Launchpad) immediately re-appears as they should be. One at a time though, all others need to be re-clicked likewise. For whatever apps that do not have “neighbors” on their desktops, e.g. occupy the whole space even if in different windows, I’d’ve never noticed the problem if I used Dock or Cmd+Tab to switch APPS. I do need to switch SPACES though, as 1) this is so easy with keyboard shortcuts 2) each space’s combination is important, e.g. Outlook is coupled to Finder on Space etc.
This happens to ALL apps including Finder -whenever the give Space has been left unattended for long enough. This never happens to any apps when you keep switching.
This only started to occur 3-4 days ago, the only event that took place about that time is MagicPrefs installation (could it possibly affect that?! OK, now I occasionally use 4-finger click for Cmd+W, so what?). This NEVER happened before, with spaces unattended for days keeping showing all the app windows as last left.
System resources (CPU, RAM, HDD) on the iMac 2011 are abundant (<1% CPU used etc.). No external displays.
Why could this happen to me, all of a sudden??? Thanks!

iTunes v10.5.1b2 fixed it. Thank you all

Spaces disappear in Word Documents being swapped between Mac and PC

Anyone know about the mysterious disappearances of spaces in Word?
Two days ago, I was working on a Word doc with a PC word user, swapping the 150 page document (w/figs, TOC, etc) back and forth several times. Spaces kept disappearing - sometimes between a period and the next word, sometimes between words. It took us a while to figure out something weird was happening. I will research it more tomorrow, but it seemed to only occur when we transferred the doc from one machine to the other.
We were working dated and the latest versions of Office for both PC and Mac.
Any ideas?

I resolved this myself. The problem turned out to be a file path name error.

Where has my harddrive space gone?

I will soon be getting a new MacBook with a solid state harddrive. It will likely be smaller than the 500GB drive I use now, so I am calculating what size I need. I can do without some of my own files (under "Users"), but I imagine I need everything else. However, the math just isn't adding up. My folders on the HD are as follows:
apps 12.8 GB
library 12.47 GB
system 4.45 GB
total non-user files = 29.72 GB
My "users" folder is 236.39 GB
grand total = 266.11 GB used.
However, under "info" after ctrl-clicking the HD, it says I am using 406.75 GB! (unused = 58.69, capacity = 465.44.)
What am I missing? Is this missing data hidden but essential and needing to be factored in to my new HD?

Check your hard drive space again using one of the following...
OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $1 or is a free utility that checks HD space.
SpaceControl is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $.99 - FreeSpace shows you how much space is available on all local, connected, and network drives with a single click.
Where did my Disk Space go?

Space Disappears when Converting to Excel

Dear community, I require assistance! The issue here is that when I convert my pdf to excel the consecutive spaces in between disappears. I'd like to know if there are any methods that would allow me to convert and yet retain the space.
I have attached a screenshot as reference.
Any assistance is much appreciated!

The PDF doesn't look like an excel file unless it’s a CVS file.
In that cits either Comma separated or Tabb separate file. In that case you might get what you are getting.
If an Excel file in a xlsx file format is turned into a PDF. And then turned back into a PDF by choosing:
Save As Other > Spreadsheet > Excel Workbook. It will pretty much revert complete Excel Format that looks like the original. You might have to do minor formatting but it will look like an original.

Harddrive space "disappearing" vitrually

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