Over 25 gb of space disappeared

Here's my problem: over the past couple days I did a really good clean out of my computer and managed to free up several gigabytes of data and was hovering around 233+ gb of free space.
Then in the last couple of days I noticed my trash file was taking a really long time to empty (I don't know if this is part of the problem but wanted to mention it just in case).
Last night I noticed I was missing quite a lot of space on my drive, it was around 205 gigs now. I discovered I had accidentally set some large torrent files to be on my main drive instead of an external. No matter, I figured! I would just delete them and start them over on the external. But my disk space didn't seem to change. So I rebooted - after all I had recently used Photoshop and that tends to hog a bunch of space and I don't get it back until I reboot.
I rebooted and there was still the same ~205 gb of free space. I was very confused. I was even more confused when I checked "About My Mac" and saw that it was telling me that in actual fact I only had around 90gbs of free space. THE HECK!?
I did notice that my "backups" were surprisingly high - 119gb in fact. This was especially curious since I have a time machine drive (time capsule) thats supposed to be backing up hourly. I did get a message this morning telling me it was full, but isn't it supposed to clear itself out?
Running WhatSize (it's still running by the way) I see that my .MobileBackups folder is a gargantuan 134gb! I thought these were temporary! For when I'm not connected to Time Machine (WHICH I AM!)
What in the **** is going on? How did I magically lose close to 25 gigs? And how the **** do I get it back?

Time Machine disk full - see C4 in the first link.
Time Machine Troubleshooting
Time Machine Troubleshooting Problems
What might be taking up your space.
Local Snapshots - About
Local Snapshots on Portable Macs

Similar Messages

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

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly apprec

I made a dumb decision to 'Erase Free Space' on my drive. I now have no free space, I realize because it wrote 0's over all my free space. Is there a way to undo this??? Help please I can't save any documents now! Thanks in advance all, it is truly appreciated. how can find the hidden temporary files using the terminal what do i type in?

It's more likely a failed Erase Free Space, which creates a huge temporary file; that's why it looks like you have no more available drive space. You can recover from this. See these links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10938738#10938738
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/quickie/recovering_from_a_failed_secure_erase_fre e_space
Post back if you need any help with this.

How do you change the drive that my Iphone backs-up to on my computer? My first attempt to back-up and i received a pop-up stating that I do not have sufficient memory/space, knowing that I have over 120GB of free space...any ideas? thanks

How do you change the drive that my Iphone backs-up to on my computer? My first attempt to back-up and i received a pop-up stating that I do not have sufficient memory/space, knowing that I have over 120GB of free space...any ideas? thanks

dave0915,
iTunes stores your iPhone backups in the Library folder in your Home folder.
iTunes places the backup files in these places:
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/
Create and delete iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch backups in iTunes
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT4946
Regards,
Allen

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

IOS 5 took over 33gb in "other" space, what did I do wrong?

So I just did the IOS5 update and now my "other" category takes up 33gb. This can't be right. Any ideas of what I can do to fix?

RESTORE NOT NEEDED TO RESOLVE "OTHER" SPACE ISSUES
I may have a solution for this as I also experience this problem on the iPad 4 (retina display) 16gb where by I had over 2gb as "other space"
First and foremost "other space" should be between 800mb and 900mb - these are preferences, apps, syncing data (not the actual photos your contacts yo may sync)
I plugged my iPad into computer and did my normal sync
I ejected the iPad.
I turned the iPad off by pressing the on/off button and then sliding across to power down
I waited 5 - 10 minutes
I turned the iPad back on and waited another 5 - 10 minutes
I connected it back to my PC and opened iTunes
I noticed that the 2.74gb "other" space reduced to 835.4mb within a few seconds.
I downloaed iExplorer and installed it (free version will do the trick)
Have iTunes open with iPad already connected
Open iExplorer and click "demo"
Under your iPad navigate to Media> Photodata> Thumbnails
Here you will see the following file names: 158x158, 240x240, and 332x332 with the extension .ithmb - make a note of these file sizes.
Right-click each one and hit delete and click ok if a warning sign comes up
Eject iPad using iTunes
Close any open apps
Do a hard reboot - hold the home button down and the on/off button together until the screen goes black and turns off - this can take up to 10-15 seconds to do
Sometimes the iPad may reboot by itself, and sometimes it may not - if it doesn't use the on/off switch to turn it on.
Open iTunes and then iExplorer and navigate to Media> Photodata> Thumbnails once again
You will see the same files you just deleted - but instead of being the size you made a note of, they will be considerably smaller.
Go to iTunes and check your "other" space and should be within the 800mb to 900mb
This also works with the iPhone 4s and other devices running iOs 4 onwards.
I have several devices currently on iOs 6.1.1 and all the "other" space currently shows between 800mb and 900mb which would appear to be normal
I hope all this helps and please let me know if it solves or doesn't solve your issues
RESTORE NOT NEEDED TO RESOLVE "OTHER" SPACE ISSUES

HT203097 Why do I receive a message that states I need to change to my media sync settings on iphone when my summary shows over 3GB of free space?

Why do I receive a message that states I need to change to my media sync settings on iphone when my summary shows over 3GB of free space? THe message states the amount of storage needed (610 MB), which is considerably less than my summary shows currently available.

# Yes, if you go to accounts.firefox.org, sign out, you will now be signed out.
# Sign back in, and you will be asked to save the password you entered.
# This will save the password and autocomplete if you have this option turned on.
I am not exactly sure why the menu did not detect the password change or if it was stored incorrectly after you changed it? But after storing the correct password you can manage any duplicate passwords in the password manager.[[Password manager - Remember, delete and change saved passwords in Firefox]]

Over 100 GBs of space on my HD is missing..

Hi,
I have a 15 inch Macbook Pro mid-2010 model(320 GB) and I seem to be missing over 100 GBs of HD space. I was getting the error "Your startup disc space is almost full" yesterday so I checked and noticed I had only 2.6 GBs of HD space left. I went into storage and noticed that over 180 GBS of space was being taken up by other.
I went through and cleared out about 6 GBs of space from my downloads and ran Omni Disc Sweeper to figure out what the heck is going on. After running ODS, it came back as that I was only using 192.7 GBs of space but my computer was saying I was using over 310!
I figured out a way to clear out about 18 more gigs of space with the HD Cleaner app and now I have 26.6 GBs of space.
I ran a program called Disc Art to see if that will tell show me where this hidden GB space is and that came back as the same thing, Im only using 168.9 of my HD space but my computer is telling me I'm using 292.3 GBs of space.
I have googled everything and I have checked all of the suggestions, it is not the time machine snapshots(I don't even have time machine turned on now), the mail duplication error, giant log file, or any of those other common problems.
I am so confused,
Here is a screen shot of the storage
I think the majority of it is coming from the Other category, but I am lost right now.
Whatever it is, seems to be gradually decreasing my hard drive space. Hopefully someone has run across something like this before.
Thanks for any help.

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 see everything, you have to run it as root.
Back up all data now.
If you have more than one user account, make sure you're logged in as an administrator. The administrator account is the one that was created automatically when you first set up the computer.
Install the app you downloaded in the Applications folder as usual. Quit it if it's running.
Triple-click anywhere in the line of text below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
Launch the built-in 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 by pressing command-V. You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. Type carefully and then press return. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator. Ignore any other messages that appear in the Terminal window.
The application window will open, eventually showing all files in all folders, sorted by size. It may take a few minutes for the app to finish scanning.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of doing this. Don't delete anything as root. If something needs to be deleted, make sure you know what it is and how it got there, and then delete it by other, safer, means. When in doubt, leave it alone or ask for guidance.
When you're done with the app, quit it and also quit Terminal.

IOS5 on iPhone 3GS - 'over capacity' unknown used space & can't sync music.

I just downloaded the new iOS5 for my iPhone 3GS, and ever since I got it, I can't sync my music as it says that it is 'over capacity', even though I had over 6GB of free space left before the upgrade.
I also found out that I have 9.9GB of 'other' in which I didn't have before iOS5 upgrade.
I just want to get rid of the 'other' category & sync my music on my iPhone -- HELP!!!

Similar issues as in you don't got your music back on the phone? That's not the same problem or anything "similar" to this problem i must say!
Your problem is simple, you always need to resync the music from your current computer when you upgrade to a new iOS version, most people don't see this as a problem as they simply drag and drop their files to the iphone(or itunes library) or sync from their library if the music already exist in there.
So for you, just find the music on your computer and drag and drop them to your phone if you have selected to handle music/videos manually in itunes when you click your iphone on the summary "page".

OS takes up over 3 GB of space. Can I minimize this as I am struggling with constantly managing the sync which is making me think the droid alternative with iTunes app is the better approach.

I am restricted to a 16 GB phone and am constantly struggling with space when I sync or update. I noticed today that the OS takes up over 3 GB of space as the capacity is listed at 12.68 GB. Any suggestions on this other than get an android and use the iTunes app instead? Frustrated.

No, the OS doesn't take up over 3GB of space.
The difference between 16GB and 12.68GB is primarily attributable to the difference between decimal math (used by every computer and component manufacturer on Earth for stating capacity in customer facing documentation) and binary math, used by processors and operating systems. This has been an issue since the 1970's.
Think more about managing the content and apps you actually keep on the phone. If you haven't used an app in months, you probably don't need it. Don't let your phone get cruffed up with games and apps you don't use. You also probably don't need to keep your entire media library on it for when you're on the go.
Extract photos from the phone to your computer on a regular basis then delete them from the phone as you would from any other digital camera. Sync the photos you actually want with you to the phone. iCloud Photo Library may give some relief from this once it's out of beta.

-AV files that are taking up over 75% of storage space

I'm having this problem with my XSAN where users are digitzing in 10 uncompressed footage with files that will take up over half the remaining storage space. I'm talking one quicktime that will be anywhere between 3-5TB's. It is an intermittent problem. I have updated my the clients to XSAN 1.1, with the latest Xserve Raid drivers as well. We're running FCP 4.5 on 10.3.9 systems, and the XSAN is running on 10.3.9 as well with all current updates. Anybody else running into this?

Hi there Billy. I had the same problem. And I to am using the Kona cards and versions of the OS and FCP. It does seem to be some bug in FCP that is causing this problem. The way we get around is to first avoid using the "capture now" command. But when we have to we just monitor the available space and if it all of a sudden disappears then we can go back and delete that FCP file from the XSAN. It is usually only a 8k file in the finder. But when you delete it you will get all your space back.
The command line version is to
ran this command:
server name:/volumes/xsan admin$ du -hc
found this file: 912G ./FCP /Capture Scratch/Untitled Project 1 (showed as 8k in finder)
ran this command to remove it: server name:/volumes/xsan/FCP /Capture Scratch admin$ sudo rm -R Untitled\ Project\ 1/
in this case the file was named Untitled Project 1.
Hope this helps you

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?

Over 25 gb of space disappeared

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for