XServe boot drive losing free space

A 10.5.8 Server with a full hard drive (zero free space).
Booted from external. Found out most of the space (60GB worth of an 80GB drive) was being occupied by files in /usr/share/swupd/http
Apparently, the Software Update Server had been downloading files for awhile until it filled the drive.
Trashed a couple gigabytes (from a different folder) to free up some space to boot. Turned off the Software Update service. Within a few minutes, the drive filled up again.
Trashed 20GB from /usr/share/swpud/http
Within an hour, free space was back down to 10GB and subtracting noticeably.
For some reason, Console crashes upon launch, so I can't easily check the logs.
Activity Monitor reveals no suspicious or runaway processes.
Also, Xserve is offline for the moment, so it's not downloading anything from the internet.
Any ideas what's chewing up space?

Do you have some sort of web proxy for filtering? Such as Websense? There seems to be an issue with swupd authenticating through a proxy that causes this in 10.5.8. The solution we used was to disable filtering based on the 10.5.8 machine's IP.

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External hard drive losing free space

Hi,
Having replaced my MacBook's stock 80 GB hard drive, I purchased a FireWire drive enclosure so I could continue to use it as a backup drive. I back up my home folder manually, since I don't feel the need to purchase backup software. Recently I've noticed that deleting files on the external drive does not free up the previously-occupied space. Thus, the drive (which is shown to have 74.21 GB of total space) seems to have only 16.28 GB of free space, while both Get Info and du say that only 28 or 29 GB are being used. I'm not sure what the problem could be, or what my next steps should be. Any ideas/solutions?
Thanks in advance,
Larry

Oh wait, never mind. I had checked .Trashes from the Terminal, but usually I had ls set up to display "/" after any directories. There had been one entry in .Trashes, "501", without a slash afterwards. I had thus assumed that this was just a file. I came back after posting and figured I'd run a du on .Trashes and discovered that "501" was in fact a folder of some sort that contained 29 GB of deleted files! After deleting this folder, my drive's free space is now correct.
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Larry

Why am I losing free space on my mac?

I'm currently down to 143.4MB of available space, my capacity is 499.76GB. I freed up some space by getting rid of some picture and files I don't need so i then had 4.32GB but then an apple tech told me to unload everything in my caches which I did but instead of recoverning more free space now I have less. Somebody please help me if you can.
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First, empty the Trash if you haven't already done so. Then reboot. That will temporarily free up some space. According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB free on the startup volume for normal operation. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of your data. Use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper to explore your volume and find out what's taking up the space. Proceed further only if the problem hasn't been solved. 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 really see everything, you have to run it as root. Back up all data now. Launch the Terminal application in either 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. After installing ODS in the Applications folder, drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
I don't recommend that you make a habit of this. Don't delete anything while running ODS as root. When you're done with it, quit it and also quit Terminal.

Why do my external hard drives not free space when I delete things?

I have a Macbook Pro running Lion 10.7. I have a problem where my external hard drives tend not to free up space when I delete items from them. I have been resorting to regularly reformatting my drives for the pen drives, but now it is happening with my large backup drives. It happens for both OS-journaled and FAT-32 formatted disks. Any answers?
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When you move items to the trash, no space is freed since you're simply moving a file into a different folder (the .Trashes folder). When you empty the trash, the space will be freed. You must empty the trash while the external drive is connected for it to take effect.
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My hard drive have free space over the limit...

Hi every one, I've a strange issue here. My HD indicate me that I've more space than it should but in «About This Mac» and «System Report» I've 36GB left. The strange thing is that there is about 217Gb of Backup? What is wrong...

Do you use Time Machine? If not, do you have it enabled?
If so, it appears to be making backups of your system on your hard drive.
Here is some info:
http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
FWIW, you should not have your backup on your startup drive - if something goes wrong with your drive, you will also lose your backup.

Hard drive free space issues..

Hope someone can help me with this weird problem..
Every time I boot my macbook the hard drive space is correct but if I add files to the hard drive the free space goes down. When I remove any files the free space does not change. I've tried relaunching finder many times no change. This has been happening since 10.5.4. I have found that the only way to remedy this is to reboot.
This is getting annoying as I don't reboot my macbook regularly. It spends most of its time in sleep mode..
Thanks.

Try:
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
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Please re-post if this is still an issue to the Legacy Application Development SDKs Forum or purchase a case and have a dedicated support engineer work with you directly
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Want to save my iTunes files in an external hard drive to free up space for next semester

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Copy all your iTunes music to external HDD
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Free space on boot drive constantly decreases until reboot

Hi there. I have a really weird thing happening that I've never seen before.
I'm running 10.7.4 on an iMac, and have about 45GB free on the system drive. At least that's right after I boot up the system. After that, the free space available on my HD slowly but constantly decreases, and the computer slowly but surely becomes less responsive. When the free space on the boot drive gets down around 37GB (which takes 2-3 days... I usually never turn the machine off) I get so many spinning beach balls... in ALL applications... that the computer becomes basically unuseable and I am forced to reboot. But as soon as I do, free space is back up to 45GB, and computer is snappy and fast again.
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Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
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read this article, it is outdated, but the info in it is still relevant: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24002. Do a 7 pass erase. That conformed to the U.S. Department of Defense's security procedures until they changed their rules to that of completely destroying hard drives physically instead.

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This one has me scratching my head.
I've been through all the insanity of trying to get A3 up and running and have decided to give up until Apple gets their act together.
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My startup drive should have over 400GB of freespace, so there is plenty of space. This problem also occurs when I connect my Macbook Pro in target mode and attempt to transfer over files.
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Hi iliveontrantor, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Have you emptied the Trash on those drives?
Could be many things, we should start with this...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
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3. Click the First Aid tab.
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http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
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(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.)
If perchance you can't find your install Disc, at least try it from the Safe Boot part onward.
How much free space is on the HD, where has all the space gone?
OmniDiskSweeper is likely the easiest/best, and is now free...
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/download/

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Hard drive "free space"

I had a new hard drive installed and my original ghosted over. The drive is guid formatted and now has about 120 gigs of "free space" that I can't seem to touch. If I try to reboot from my orginal drive in an external inclosure via firewire it always bounces back to the installed drive thus not allowing me any use of DU. The "Free space" is just sitting there when i open DU with no way of accessing. When i select it in the partitions tab all is greyed out and is says it is guid.
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If the original drive was taken out, put in an externan FW enclosure and not altered in any way, you should be able to boot from it instead of the new internal drive. Plug it in, power it up, reboot the Mac and press the Option key before the startup sound. A screen will appear from where you can choose the external drive: since both will probably have the same name, guide yourself with the icons to distinguish the external from the internal.
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XServe boot drive losing free space

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