Something eating my harddrive space?

Hello,
Over the past few weeks I've found I am increasingly receiving the message 'your harddrive is almost full'. I make space by deleting some things, or moving stuff to an external harddrive but within a couple of hours I get the message again. It seems like something is slowly eating up the space.
I did a quick search online and someone suggested rebooting which I did and indeed some of the space came back (normally up to 1GB) but then within an hour it had gone again. It's infuriating! I can't think where all the space has gone in the first place. I don't have time to go to an apple store anytime soon but I have so much work to get done over Christmas and it's almost impossible with having to reboot 4 or 5 times a day. If anyone has any suggestions I'd be eternally grateful!
Oh, and I am a not great with computers so if possible, bare that in mind!
Many thanks

Also, here is Freeing Up Disk Space in case you need it.
DALE

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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
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Something eating space on my HD !?!?

Imac 2009 OSX ver 10.7.5. I've used this machine for 4 years , no problems. A few days ago, I started getting the "disc full" message. OK, I have over 5000 photos on here, I'll just upload them to Flickr, who now offers 1TB of free storage for pictures, then delete them from the machines drive to free up space.. So far so good. I have moved over 100 photos in the past week and now (had) 24G free disk space. In doing all this I would empty the iphoto trash and regular trash as I went along.
A couple of days into it, I started geting the wheel of death, and when I opened the activity monitor to see what might be slowing things down, I see red "not responding message(s). I force closed things I was not using like printer, etc. The situation continues to worsen. I now need to reboot several times per day to get the computer to respond, & it won't wake up if I walk away and it goes to sleep.
I have tried to change preferences to sleep "never" and also to get rid of the login screen which mysteriously appeared several days ago. I have never had a log-in screen before.
Anyway, I looked at my hard drive today and my 24 GB free space is down to 9GB !. Something is eating my drive space.
I have run several disc cleaners, malware & virus cleaners to no avail.
Any suggestions?
Thanks, Mike

OK, now it's worse... I just received this message: "your maxc OSX startup disc has no more space for application memory"
Looking at the HD it says I have 24GB free. Why would it produce this message?
Thanks, Mike

Can i restrict apple mail client from downloading all emails...and allow it to pick a start date for gmail mail to sync? i am flooded with old emails, thousands on them ...eating hard drive space of my macbook pro and un necessary overhead

can i restrict apple mail client from downloading all emails...and allow it to pick a start date for gmail mail to sync? i am flooded with old emails, thousands on them ...eating hard drive space of my macbook pro and un necessary overhead

The genius bar technicians can check your MBP for possible hardware problems and specific software issues that you may have. The diagnosis will be free. Any extensive repairs will not be free.
If you have minor software problems, you essentially will have to deal with them yourself. Examine these two comprehensive documents for possible problem definition and solutions. If you encounter problems that you are unable to cope with, start a new discussion and there will be persons willing to assist you in solving them.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3521
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3353
Ciao.

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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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.

Security copy eats my storage space on my MBP

security copy eats my storage space on my MBP pleas help

http://pondini.org/OSX/LionStorage.html
http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

Storage Question: My macbook air says I have 35gb worth of movies. I only have 1 movie that I'm aware of! How do I solve whats eating all this space?

My macbook air says I have 35gb worth of movies. I only have 1 movie that I'm aware of! How do I solve whats eating all this space?
Please help me!!

    Lion OS X 10.7 Lion / 10.8 Mountain Lion
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Quicktime is eating up my harddrive space

Hi,
I recently discovered that the space on my harddrive is shrinking. I have a partitioned drive as most do I assume and the first partition is for Windows, programs etc. Any media an so on are on other partitions. The problem sits in the first partition for programs. I have located the problem and it seems to be a folder with the following path that has more than 15 gig of QTCH files in it.
Local drive > User > AppData > Locallow > Apple Computer > Quicktime > Downloads
Following this there are a number of folders named as 00, 01, 02 so on. So I have a range of questions if anyone can be kind of enough to help. What is this? Why has it grown to this proportion? Can I delete it? Will it grow back? Does it have to do with a setup in Quicktime?
I predominantly use Quicktime watching movie trailers on apple.com. I suspect that it has to do with that since I don't use Quicktime for anything else than that.
Thanks

If you open the QT control panel and click on the Advanced tab you'll see Download Cache. You can click on Empty Cache to remove them and yes they will grow back. You could try setting the Download Cache, Size: It can be set to 0 MB, so you might want to experiment with that. I forget what they are. I believe just a Temp file that gets created, as does in Windows C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Temp and Temporary Internet Files

Something is eating my harddrive!

No, this isn't some sort of Halloween fright, but it is scary.
Yesterday, I got a pop-up telling me that my old G4 was just about out of space on the startup drive. Since this sucker has been going for many years, mostly as an e-mail machine and office duty machine.
I went through and got rid of a ton of garbage, and was left with 8GB on the startup drive. Well, a half hour ago, I got the message again! I looked at the drive and it now had 800MB. I watched the drive as it slowly whittled 60MB!
I have NO IDEA what is happening or how to find out. Anyone have any ideas?!

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.
Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.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
Are you using FileVault?
 Cheers, Tom

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

30-40x processes called "unar" eats up harddrive, memory and processor when TV is connected as external display. What is this and how do I get rid of it?

What is this process and why does it eat up all my hard drive space, memory and processor every time external display is connected? If I have the display connected for long enough, it could easily eat up 60-70 gigs of my hard drive.

Somehow we need to identify what this "unar" process is.
Are you sure that this UnrarX is not in your login items ?? (the things to be automatically started at login)
Perhaps removing any login startup items would help in isolating the problem
As far as I find out, there's no easy way.
There is the source of simple program that will tell you the path to a process from it PID. That's certainly not very elegant but you can find it here.
Looking at your screen shot it would appear (just looking at the indentation) that the "unar" processes are not running as a sub-process of some other process like launchd, sh, Terminal, or something else.
If that's not the case then a important piece of information would be the parent process.
In the screenshot of a fragment of Activity Monitor below, bash is a sub process of login which is a sub process of Terminal. This structure only shows up if you sleected "all Processes, Hierarchically"
It would be useful to look at all the views of processes available in Activity Monitor.
By identifying in which views it shows up we can learn if it is a:
System process
one of My processes
other User Process
Windowed process
etc
This will help us in knowing where to look for "unar" and perhaps to figure out what it is, and why it keeps showing up

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.

IMAP and Harddrive space

Until a few weeks ago, I had used POP to access my Gmail account. I switched to IMAP.
The other day, I ran DiskInventoryX (http://www.derlien.com/) and discovered that my mailboxes were taking up about 10GB of space on my harddrive. I'm diligent about deleting emails that contain large files and I just went through all of my folders and deleted a number of emails.
The files that are taking up the most space are .emlxpart files.
Is there some way to stop Mail from storing these files? Does this have something to do with the synchronization?

The most rigourous thing you can do is: delete the account to make a fresh start, and create the account from scratch after restarting mail.app. (make sure you do not select 'keep messages and attachments for offline viewing') But you have 'to be in the mood' to do so.
Since mail.app already downloaded all those large attachments, it will not throw those away after you've changed your settings (post above). It will only apply your new settings to NEW incoming mail. So if you really need the disk space you can recreate the account...
Message was edited by: feddeg

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?

Something eating my harddrive space?

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