Mystery files clogging up my boot drive!

I just got a message that my startup disk is nearly full. That was a surprise. When I did a "get info" on the four folders on the drive, Applications, Users, System and Library, the amount of space used adds up to about 75 GB. But when I do a "get info" on the boot drive that houses those folders, it says 115 GB are used. The boot drive is a 120 GB Mercury Elite, and I store the majority of my pictures, data and music on another internal drive.
How do I figure out where these "mystery files" are that are clogging up my boot drive?

Surely you can shrink and create a 160GB partition and you have in the past done both? Or use the partition you have. I like to have "current" or working image, a backup from pre-10.8.3, an image from 10.6.8 etc
use CCC or Disk Utility to make a clone or sparse disk image.
Restore image with ERASE and RESTORE.
In future use Disk Utility and it will see that TRIM is present and DU repair disk will perform a trim operation - you will see output on screen at the end of a repair.
Head to the developer home page for TE.
Hibernation on Bing:
mac os x hibernation
Sure you understand cloning - and my sprained finger I try to ignore or use OMNI for disksweeper
Using Cloning as a Backup Strategy
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7032/carbon-copy-cloner
http://www.bombich.com/software/updates/ccc-3.5.html
OS X Lion Install to Different Drive
How to create an OS X Lion installation disc MacFixIt
Migration Assistant Update for Mac OS X Snow Leopard
http://www.apple.com/support/lion/installrecovery/
Create an OS X Lion Install disc
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20080989-263/how-to-create-an-os-x-lion-ins tallation-disc
How to clone your system:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-HowToClone-backup.html
http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-HowToClone.html
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7032/carbon-copy-cloner
http://www.macperformanceguide.com/blog/2012/20120711_2-MacPro-internal-clone-ba ckup.html
OmniDiskSweeper
https://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/

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File level clone of boot drive leaves extra folders, can I remove or hide?

I made a file level drive clone with DiskUtility and then again with Carbon Copy Cloner (to confirm behavior) in preparation to go from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 and found extra folders on the new copy.
dev
home
net
These folders are in addition to the usual app, users, library etc. They appear to behave like /etc and /var in that there is not a folder for them on a non running OS boot drive. They claim to be empty. Can they be deleted, hidden, turned invisible? Advice?
Thanks.

Kostas is correct. These folders are used by the system, and will be hidden from the users when the disk is running as the current system.

Why are my render files in my boot drive/root directory?

I have configured FCP to use an external drive for my Scratch Disk to render Video Capture, Audio Capture, Video Render and Audio Render as well as the Waveform Cache, Thumbnail Cache and Autosave Vault. Plenty of room on it and for the most part, I see a lot of render files on it, just like it should do.
However, if I leave FCP running for a while, it will start to auto-render again and does so placing tons of huge files on my local boot drive right on the root directory under a folder called "Render Files". It ends up filling up my boot drive every time and need to delete them.
I have searched everywhere to find where to configure this to move it to my scratch drive, but no joy.
How do I get FPC to render these files on a non-boot drive scratch disk?
Thanks.

That's possible that's it going to sleep. But I don't think so. The problem happens when I let the editor sit too long without doing anything in it (get up for a cup of coffee, using another application to generate some text effects, etc). Then its starts rendering on its own and does so only with the local boot drive/root directory.
When it comes back, the "green line" (Preview Render) is gone and the lines are replaced with dark blue, which I think indicates the sequence was rendered in the highest possible res/codec I have selected. That's fine, but why does it insist on using the local drive when I have another specified?

New boot drive - Photoshop will not launch

I recently cloned my boot drive onto an SSD, which I now use as my boot drive. Everything works fine except when I try to launch Photoshop, I get an error that says, "Could not intialize Photoshop because the disk is not available."
I have both CS6 through Creative Cloud, and CS5. Neither will launch and both give the same error message.
I tried searching for a similar problem on the forum, but I didn't see anything. If this has already been addressed somewhere, please point me in the right direction. Otherwise, any suggestions would be appreciated.
I am running Mac OS X 10.8, and I've repaired permissions several times on my new boot drive.
Thanks.

You could try resetting preferences by starting PS and immediately holding down Cmd + Option + Shift keys. You should get a reset window.
Some users get in trouble when files are moved from default settings after installation. Also, Bridge will not work if temp file is not on boot drive.
Don't know how the cloud works. Think it is installed on computer? If so if above does not work unistall and re-install might be next step.

HT2674 I have an iMac purchased in May 2011. OSX Lion 10.7.3. I deleted backup file from the external hard drive. Now, the trash can will not empty some of the files deleted. File folder: "Core Services" contains a locked file: "boot.efi". It will not

I have an iMac purchased in May 2011. OSX Lion 10.7.3. I deleted backup file from the external hard drive which operates from Time Machine.
Now, the trash can will not empty some of the files deleted from the backup harddrive.
The trash contains-- File folder: "Core Services" which contains a locked file: "boot.efi".
It will not delete.
How do I get the trash can empty of these files?

Yes, the Old Master file has a folder for each year where I find all photos from that specific year. I am attaching a screen shot of the file.
In the meantime i have managed to download all photos (it did not download any video files though in mpg, avi, 3gp, m4v,mp4 and mov format) to a new iphoto library. Unfortunately the photos are quite mixed and often doubled up. I ma considering to purchase iphoto library which checks all duplicates in iphoto. this will save me a lot of time. What do you think?

Creating a Mavericks USB boot drive after the horse has bolted. Can I create a bootable USB drive from my iMac after installing Mavericks without saving the Install OS X Mavericks.app file? Do I need to re- download the whole 5.29 Gb again?

Creating a Mavericks USB boot drive after the horse has bolted. Can I create a bootable USB drive from my iMac after installing Mavericks without saving the Install OS X Mavericks.app file? Do I need to re- download the whole 5.29 Gb from the App Store again? My problem is my 4Gb/month allowance on a 12 month contract. I cannot purchase a data block from my ISP and although my speed is theoretically slowed to 64k after reaching my 4Gb, it actually ceases to download in reality.

HI tasclix, it depends what you mean by an OS X boot drive.
If you want a recovery disk from which you can reinstall (by re-downloading) or recover from a time machine backup, then nbar is correct.
If, however, you want to boot and run the OS X installer from the USB drive (so that you don't need to download again), then you will need a copy of "Install OS X Mavericks.app"; see this article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5856
Before downloading again, search your system to see if the installer is still there - it's usually in the /Applications folder unless it has been deleted, but check your whole system for it anyway, you never know, you might still have it somewhere.
Message was edited by: SilverSkyRat

C: hard drive (boot drive) for dowloading and installing files

Hi, I do not want Adobe Creative Cloud to be installed on my C: hard drive.
I thought that setting up the install drive in Creative Cloud would fix the pb for the apps I want to install, but:
the Creative Cloud software itself is installed on C:
the apps are installed on C:
and the download location off the apps that is used to download and dezip the files before the app is installed.
Does anyone can tell me how to solve this (HUGE) problem: my boot drive is a small SSD and I would rather not use it for temp files and non system software.
Thank you for your answers.

Hi Paul,
Should I use a utility for copying files? or just the finder.d
Finner won't work, Best way to get an exact bootable copy of your old drive to the new one is with Carbon Copy Cloner...
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
Or SuperDuper...
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/
Have you Formatted the new Drive yet?

Mystery File in Trash and Locked Disks

Hi all,
Have some weirdness going on with my system. First, I have a mystery file appearing in my trash that can not be identified. It appeared about the same time as I started having problems with three of my external drives that I can not access anymore.
The file is named ␀␀␀÷␀␀.÷␀ . It says that it is an alias as type. If you try to get info, it disappears. It will not trash or secure trash. It can not be removed from the Trash folder.
At the same time I have had three external drives start malfunctioning. The files first became unaccessible, could not be copies or delete. The drives would not allow new files to be added. The drive will not unmount and indicates that the drive is engage with an application. Then, the file completely vanish from view. The disk show zero items, but the disk size still indicates the files are still on the drive.
I've use DiskWarrior and DriveGenius to try and repair one of the drives with no success. Even booting from the CD/DVD disk, the drives will not unmount.
I hope this is not some kind of virus or trojan horse.
Let me know if there is something I can do.
Thanks

Take a look at this topic: NUL file in Trash won't go away.
You'll almost certainly find this file is in the Trash on a Windows volume, and you'll need to use Windows to get rid of it.

Boot Drive fills on it's own...?

So start of another school year...build and test images, blah, blah, blah. Everything running great. After all machines were imaged I notice server is responding slow. Log on through ARD and i'm met with a warning message that HD is almost full (4mb remaining!). Its a small boot partition so I think maybe I made it too small (though I've had no issues the past few years). Install new drive with larger partition and clone. Reboot and everything is good. Today after the weekend I come in and see that the new boot drive has filled itself as well. Right now NO ONE is using or accessing the drives as I haven't enrolled the kiddos yet. So it's happening on it's own accord. I'm sure the clone just copied whatever originally caused the problem, and it just took longer to fill the much larger drive.
Suggestions?

No cause found yet. Has happened twice so far for me....even put in new HD to give it "room". Here's an interesting artifact that someone may be able to run with:
Last time it happened I started it up in FW mode on another machine. Finder verifies that drive is full. No Logs of abnormal size, no mystery folder of GB unaccounted for...major frustration. Decide I'll boot normally and let it run dog slow so I can check console out. Guess what? It booted fine and reported back with 60GB of free space! My first thought that maybe the swap file wasn't clearing itself but surely booting into FWDM would have forced clear it. Long story short, I'm keeping an eye on the HD storage levels...been holding strong for a week now. If it happens again, maybe try just rebooting machine....

I need to do a clean install of maverick on my 2010 mbp what disk do i use and how do i move certain files from an external hard drive

I want to do a clean install of maverick on my 2010 mbp. I need to know what disk to use and also how i take certain files off my external hard drive and put on my computer. When I was having problems with my airport they did a clean install and they pulled files of my time machine.   however they forgot to put the partition back in for a windows side. Originally I had Parellels on my computer. After my external hard drive got corrupted i called apple and they fixed the problem but didn't have me set up the time machine except for the external hard drive. Now my only back up is from the external not from the laptop.    I am not sure how to do any of this. I am not computer savvy...PLEASE I NEED HELP>

First, you need to make a backup of your MBP onto your external drive. I suggest you start by cloning your MBP drive to the external drive:
Clone Mavericks, Lion/Mountain Lion using Restore Option of Disk Utility
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
     1. Select Disk Utility from the main menu then press the Continue
         button.
     2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.
     3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
     4. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it
         to the Destination entry field.
     5. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to
         the Source entry field.
     6. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.
This clone is fully bootable and also contains a clone of your Recovery HD.
Second, you need to do a clean install of OS X onto your MBP as follows:
Install or Reinstall Mavericks or Mountain Lion from Scratch
Be sure you backup your files to an external drive or second internal drive because the following procedure will remove everything from the hard drive.
OS X Mavericks- Erase and reinstall OS X
OS X Mountain Lion- Erase and reinstall OS X
OS X Lion- Erase and reinstall Mac OS X
Note: You will need an active Internet connection. I suggest using Ethernet if possible
            because it is three times faster than wireless.
This should accomplish your goals. You will have a clean install of OS X on your MBP and a bootable clone of your old system and all your files on the external drive.

Macbook Pro Freezing, Can't back up files either to external hard drive either..

Hi,
I'm not entirely sure what happened but my Macbook Pro, (Lion/Mac OS X 10.7.5) just started to freeze a lot. I can hardly browse the web or sometimes browse folders. In some ocassions its even difficult to check the Activity monitor or go to Disk Utitlity. I always see the rainbow beach ball of death and in the force quit window I see the red "Not responding."
Because of this issue, I plan on taking my Macbook Pro to Apple but the problem is I can't even back up my files. I just started a time machine and it goes well until in the middle of the transfer it says:
"The backup was not performed because an error occured while copying files to the back up disk.
The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. If the problem persists, use Disk Utility to repair your backup disk."
so I tried a different ext. hard drive and still, it says the same message. Upon being fed up of the situation, I attempted to do the old school copy paste from drive to drive but again, in the middle of the transfer it stops and gives me a a differnet message:
"The finder can't complete the operation because some data in ____ can't be read or written."
I checked the file and its a .MOV a video file from my DSLR. I skipped this file and then again, it said the exact same message on a different video file. I can't just avoid these video files. I'm actually a film maker and all this clips are in desparately in need to be backed up.
Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Atleast backing up the files..
Thanks for the help.
p.s.
Not sure if this is related -- since my Macbook Pro has been running slow I deleted a couple of apps such as Things, DaVinci Resolve and FrameForge Previz.. Which to led to having my spolight indexing. I thought it was only the index thats making it run slow but the index done now and I can't back up my files!

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:
syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CSeq "I/O error" | tail | open -f -a TextEdit
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
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 icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. Normally the window will be empty. If you get output like this:
kernel[0] <Debug>: disk0s2: I/O error
the boot drive is failing, or there's some other hardware fault in the storage subsystem.

Is the spotlight index stored on the boot drive or individual volumes?

Hello!
My questions are pretty simple, and are sumarized here (from the block of text below):
First, if I have several external hard drives, is the Spotlight index file for each drive stored on the external hard drive, or on OS X's boot drive?
Secondly, if it's stored on the boot drive, can I copy these files to another Tiger-running Mac to eliminate the need to re-index the hard drives? Where do I find them?
Third: Leopard's Spotlight has quite a few new features. Even if the Tiger index files are stored on the external drive, will it need to re-index the drive to support the new feature set?
Now for the long explenation:
I have been preparing to upgrade my Powerbook to Leopard within the next month or two, and as such, I bought a new hard drive to dedicate one of my old drives to Leopard and Time Machine. Because I have three extrernal hard drives, I needed to move about 500 GB of data between the thee drives to make room for what was on the now-dedicated drive. Of course, this requires that Spotlight re-index the "new" drives.
Today, I left all of the drives attached to my old G4, running Tiger, while it sits there indexing the three drives, totaling around a terrabyte of external storage. Because Spotlight tends to hog all of the available CPU time, and the G4 should be done indexing the drives, it would save me a lot of time if I could copy the index files over from the G4 to my Powerbook to avoid indexing them all over again. That is, if the index files are not on the external drives already. If they are on the G4's boot drive, where do I find these files?
Finally, I plan to reformat the internal hard drive of my Powerbook when I install Leopard - I make a habit of doing a fresh install for every major upgrade (eg, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, etc). To estimate the amount of time needed to upgrade, I'd be nice to know if Leopard will need to re-index the files on the external drives - even if Tiger's spotlight index is stored on the externals - for Leopard's new Spotlight features. Will it need to re-index? I would assume that until Leopard arrives, most people wouldn't know this, of course.
Thanks a bunch,
-Dan

Each drive's Spotlight index is located on that drive.
(25154)

Mac pro 2.66 Quad Core - boot drive mirrored, replace?

All,
I have a Mac Pro 2.66 Quad Core system.
I got all 'sexy' when I set it up - loaded four 1-TB drives in the 4 bays, Mirrored the boot set, also mirrored the secondary set for data.
I am getting ready to have these guys filled up (I do lots of video, pics, etc), and am thinking about 'growing' the drives to 2TB or even 3TB disks (mirrored of course, I'm paranoid).
So I am thinking about the 'how' of moving my data to the larger drive, getting things set up. I have not had any of the drives fail, so I haven't needed to do a swap out yet.
Can I simply take out one of the mirrored boot drives, put in a larger drive, and it will then rebuild the mirror?
or if anyone has some info they can point me to, I'd appreciate it.
thx

You cannot just add a larger drive and grow your RAID Volume size. You need to create an empty larger RAID Volume and COPY the data to the larger Volume, e.g., from your Backups.
Mirrored RAID is NOT Backup. It merely extends the time to repair to keep a drive failure from becoming a data disaster. RAID gives you no protection from human error, crazy software or file problems that happen "just because". You still need backup.
One of the best ways to get increased performance from a computer with the ability to support multiple Internal drives is to keep only System, Library, Applications, and the hidden unix files including paging/swap on the Boot Drive, and move everything else off. This dramatically reduces competition for the Boot Drive and everything speeds up. A Velociraptor is a little faster, and an SSD is incrementally faster still.
If that is all that is on the Boot Drive, you do not need to RAID it, since it can be reproduced from DVDs or downloads in short order. All your User files and Preferences are on other drives..
Implementing this would suggest a single small fast Boot Drive, typically with an offline clone as Backup for emergencies, and forget about RAID-ing the Boot Drive.

How do I Partition Yosemite Boot Drive Using BCA?

I replaced the HD in my Mid 2010 27" IMac to achieve greater storage. The replacement went fine with no issues, and I then installed Yosemite (10.10.1) from scratch using the latest version of Diskmaker and installing the install version of Yosemite on to a USB thumb drive. The replacement drive is a 4.0Gb drive with no prior installations on it.
Everything has gone fine, and OSX Yosemite seemingly works great.
But I need to install Boot Camp and a fresh version of Windows 7, 64bit SP1, and it just won't work at the partition step before I ever get to the Windows installation.
When I use BCA I downloaded the drivers without a hitch, but when I go to the next step I encounter the error message, "The startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition. The startup disk must be formatted as a single Mac OS extended volume or already partitioned by Boot camp Assistant for installing Windows".
I have found a number of references to this error message, but none seem to describe my situation with a new, clean, install of Mavericks.
I have a bootable backup (via Carbon Copy Cloner), and have loaded current Yosemite compatible versions of Partition Magic and TechTools onto the external bootable drive, but cannot see any problems with the drive.
Before I progress any further with installing apps on to the new drive and I still have a clean Yosemite installation on the new HD, I want to resolve the issue since Windows 7 via Boot Camp (and not via virtual software!) is essential. The prior smaller HD had a Windows 7 Boot Camp installation that worked fine.
Options that might work:
1. Boot to the external drive, and create an MS-DOS partition manually using Disk Utilities, and then try to use that partition for Windows using BCA.
2. Use low level partitioning software or terminal mode to erase the small hidden OSX restore partition, which may be why BCA thinks I have more than one partition on the boot drive. This notion shows up in some of the threads on this web site, but why would Apple allow this problem since all installations of Yosemite presumably have the hidden restore partition?
3. My new 4Gb hard drive is a hybrid SSD/HD (ST4000DX001), but this type of drive seems to be the norm now, and I do not see where this would be a problem.
4. Erase the new drive, and install a clean version of the original OSX, (Lion, I believe for the mid 2010 27" IMac) using the internet and the Cmd-R command, subsequently updating the original OSX version to Yosemite after creating a Boot Camp partition (although I don't know if BCA would work from the original version of OSX for this machine. I really don't want to do this because of the time required for the internet download, but it would take me to the original OSX image which came with the machine.
I have no issues with my Yosemite installation, and backup is not a problem since my goal was to create a clean installation of OSX uncluttered with legacy apps.
I would be grateful for any experienced suggestions, or hypotheses as to the nature of the problem.
Thanks!!!!

You can use an external disk for store files and for Time Machine, but you have to create a second volume.
To create volumes on the external disk, use Disk Utility. See > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html I recommend you to put as much space as you can for the Time Machine volume, because backups consume a lot and Time Machine starts deleting backups when the external disk is full

HELP! How can i restore/recover files from Bootcamp with Boot Failure - Missing operating system error?

Hi,
I am having a few problems with bootcamp on my imac. When i tried to move the bootcamp partition on windows 7 into free space, it crashed and turned off. Ever since i have had the error 'Missing operating system' and it fails to boot. I have some very important files on the bootcamp partition. Is it possible to recover these files or even to restore the bootcamp partition to it's original state? I do not have a backup of my bootcamp partition. Another problem i have is that ever since i tried to expand my macintosh HD partition into free space, when i hold alt while booting up (to choose which partition to boot like i normally do), the bootcamp partition has stopped appearing. This means that i cannot even boot the windows 7 bootcamp partition anymore!
So basically here are my 2 questions:
How can i restore/recover files from Bootcamp with Boot Failure - Missing operating system error?
How can i make the Bootcamp partition appear in Startup Disk and when i hold the option key while starting up my computer to allow me to boot windows 7?
Any solutions are very much apreciated!
Thanks!
I know that bootcamp (disk0s4) hasn't been fully deleted since it appears in disk utility (i cant do anything to it though)
And here is the error i see when i try to launch bootcamp (back when i was actually able to boot up bootcamp to the error screen)

WinClone 3 is OS X and saves Windows image it makes for restore - that should work but you will have to try and you would need to make a new image unless it also works with a native Windows system restore image. It is now supported and has come a long way.
http://www.twocanoes.com/
Paragon Clone OS works and does disk-to-disk clone just like CCC you end up with two bootable drives. But does not work with your setup. It would let you clone and move your Windows install to an SSD or another disk drive though and be bootable.
During its clone process it checks for errors which is very helpful and lets you know - something CCC and others should adopt more of.
http://www.paragon-software.com/downloads/demo.html
I wish for our/my sake you had re-read and rewritten the long 'story' and broken it into a brief list of facts we needed.
OS X
Windows
Backup (though external is much safer) and you want bootable OS X clones as well as TimeMachine
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1553
There are a number of things to do like chkdsk and others as well as Windows DVD to do automatic system repairs and find out why.
AppleHFS - the abilty to mount and read HFS volumes can be notorious.
I would rearrange and redo your storage setup and how you use the 4-5 internal hard drive bays.

Mystery files clogging up my boot drive!

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