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36 GB gone in 9 hours!

thewhitehart

thewhitehart

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 9, 2005
1,106
609
The town without George Bailey
I last used my computer at 10:30 pm last night, and was at 116 GB hard drive capacity. All of a sudden, I'm at 80 GB! How did all this space suddenly disappear? I haven't downloaded anything huge, and neither has my brother, who also uses the imac. I know for sure I had 116 GB, and that I haven't used even 30 GB... I have the same stuff almost mirrored on an ibook with a 60 GB drive, and I still have 37 GB left on that computer.
 
Try rebooting, maybe there's a memory leak? I really can't think of anything that would cause that, off the top of my head. Perhaps spotlight's index files if it's a brand new machine.. but even then it wouldn't take up that much space.
 
Following the advice of another thread, I tried erasing the free space on the drive while booted in safe mode. All of a sudden, whilst creating a temporary file after doing a one pass erase, I got a popup message that said there was zero space on my harddrive!

I logged back in normally after resetting. I found an EFI sparse image created as a result of the erasing free space, and it was approx 72 GB big. I deleted it. Now I'm back to where I started, 80 GB, and 36 GB missing! :mad:

Then, at the same time, expose started acting up, having a mind of it's own. Now I'm scared, I haven't done anything abusive to this machine, haven't downloaded anything big :(
 
On the advice of Mitthrawnuruodo in another thread, I have downloaded OmniDiskSweeper, and found the culprit.

It is /private/var/log/windowserver_last.log

What the #$%^ is this file, and can I delete it? How did it do this?
 
Just delete the file it's just an error log. It would appear that something happened that caused a repeating error that caused the log to swell like that. I have had this problem at least twice before. OSX keeps logs of all kernel tasks and occasionally crap happens. "Crap" could be due to a software glitch, bug, or something even more malicious like someone looking for open ports on your network.
 
I squashed the little $%^!! I was getting scared for a while, especially when it said I had 'zero' space left. I even went through attempting to repair the disk and doing a hardware check.

OmniDiskSweeper is a cool program. Finder wouldn't search the 'var' folder it was in, only my own folders and the shared folders. I never would've found it otherwise.

Speaking of errors, I download this anime .avi, and as soon as it's done downloading, quicktime cannot play it after it tries to open it. Quicktime doesn't unexpectedly quit, though - I quit it manually. I play the file with VLC, which did quit unexpectedly at some point yesterday, but long before the time of 9:44 pm when the file was created. Perhaps it was VLC?
 
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