HFS+, disk space, and weirdness

Hi all,
I leave my Mac Pro running continuously while it hosts several web applications and acts as a print and file server for my home network. Last week, I was gone for 6 days on vacation. When I returned home, I noticed a lot of weird stuff going on in every application I tried to execute, and I eventually discovered that my boot disk was out of space.
That's weird, I thought, because when I left I had about 120G of files on a 250G disk. What could have used all that space up in the meantime? I immediately started checking the obvious stuff (var/log, trashes, etc.) but found nothing amiss.
Here's where it gets weirder: Cmd-Info on the disk, or Disk Utility, or df at the command line, all show 240GB of capacity and 239.98 consumed. (I subsequently deleted a few large media files to get enough room for the system to run stably, but I'll ignore that slight reduction in used space.)
But if I go to the terminal and run at root:
/>sudo du -h -d 1 .
I get reports back showing total consumption of, basically, exactly what it was when I left, or around half the total disk. I CANNOT find what is making OS X think that the rest of the disk is totally used up.
Here's the output from df:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 233Gi 228Gi 4.1Gi 99% /
Output from du:
/>sudo du -d 1 -h .
24K ./.fseventsd
244M ./.Spotlight-V100
0B ./.Trashes
0B ./.vol
9.0G ./Applications
7.5M ./bin
0B ./cores
2.0K ./dev
2.0G ./Developer
0B ./Documents
1.0K ./home
13G ./Library
1.0K ./net
0B ./Network
407M ./opt
683M ./private
5.2M ./sbin
66M ./sw
4.5G ./System
60G ./Users
1.4G ./usr
After speaking with Applecare and getting no where, I decided to rsync the disk to another, empty, larger disk in hopes of creating a backup I could boot off of. Interestingly, rsync shows:
sent 241469882503 bytes received 25709573 bytes 18020041.94 bytes/sec
total size is 241347531673 speedup is 1.00
So it, too, sees all of this space being used!
I'm totally lost. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks, this was totally it. I was ignoring the reports on disk usage under /Volumes figuring, incorrectly, that those were only reporting usage on other drives. However, I have a series of rsync launchagents that run scheduled backups, and at some point over the past week the physical targets must have been disconnected. Unfortunately, my scripts are smart enough to figure out that the target is gone.
I saw some discussion about this on the forum you linked, but no resolution. Has anyone figured out a way to reliably detect the existence of a mounted disk (and then abort a sync operation if it's not there)?

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Relocated original files to desktop (on low disk space) and lost photos?

Help! My wife and I exchanged our vows on the Napali Coast and we lost our photos...
2006 Macbook, iphoto06:
As I was importing our 200 photos from the hike, my computer warned me that I was running out of disk space and stopped before finishing the load. I regretfully opted to delete the photos from the camera as it imported (bummer). The photos were safe in my iphoto library when I returned the following day and cleared some disk space on my hard drive. I then imported the remaining photos and everything looked normal.
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2. The images still appear in my iphoto library thumbnails when scrolling down the screen (briefly before turning to grey !'s). Can I somehow salvage the image from the thumbnails?
3. Do I have to find the original files to see the photos again?
I have learned to not mess with orignial files in iphoto, never delete when importng, and always have mucho diskspace when uploading.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Will and Julia in Kauai

As I was importing our 200 photos from the hike, my computer warned me that I was running out of disk space and stopped before finishing the load.
You should always have a minimum of 10 GB of free space on your boot hard drive for safe and proper operation of your computer. you must get at least that much free space to go forward
I regretfully opted to delete the photos from the camera as it imported (bummer).
It is recommended that you never have iPhoto delete your photos - wait until they are imported and tested (I wait for a backup cycle or two myself) and then use the camera to format the memory card - this will save you from many problems and reformats you card with every use which eliminates other issues
The photos were safe in my iphoto library when I returned the following day and cleared some disk space on my hard drive. I then imported the remaining photos and everything looked normal.
Here's where it gets weird. So I was looking at a photo and accidently deleted it from the iphoto library.
How did you do this? using iPhoto or using the finder?
I located the original file and reimported it, however the computer told me that I already had the photo in the library. I looked into help and followed the instructions to drag the rolls onto my desktop and reimport them into iphoto. I did this and consequently lost some 50 very special photos. Now the iphoto library had this giant gap filled with grey !!!'s where the photos were. I looked into the original rolls folders and found a number of the original files were now missing? Something obviously happened from me having moved the files from the originals folder to the desktop. When I returned to iphoto, I recieved a warning that I was running out of diskspace again and some of the recent changes may have been lost!
Again until you have a minimum of 10BG of free space you are risking many additional problems with your total system including iPhoto
I have searched for the files according to their file numbers (from the missing thumbnail) and the files are not coming up on my search. The original files are not in the trash either?
My questions:
1. Is there any way to trace the history of my actions and undo my actions or salvage my files?
No - but you may be able to recover the photos on your camera card using program like media recover - http://www.mediarecover.com/ - the trial version will tell you what is available for recovery
2. The images still appear in my iphoto library thumbnails when scrolling down the screen (briefly before turning to grey !'s). Can I somehow salvage the image from the thumbnails?
no
3. Do I have to find the original files to see the photos again?
Yes - either on your computer or on your camera media card
I have learned to not mess with orignial files in iphoto,
Yes - that is critical - doing so is likely to lose data and possibly photos
never delete when importng,
That is strongly recommended
and always have mucho diskspace when uploading.
Yes - 10GB minimum
LN

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Quoting Mylenium <[email protected]>:
Mylenium http://forums.adobe.com/people/Mylenium created the discussion
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HFS+, disk space, and weirdness

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