Excuse my French, but... WTF??!!!!

[Santabean2000]

Without a word of a lie I have just watched 400GB of HDD space be eaten in front of my eyes. By what??!!!

Internet disconnected...
No disk in slot drive...
Not copying any files...
No programs open...

Yet in the Finder window I could see the GBs just counting down. Scary.

After a restart everything is back to normal, except I am out 400GB of HDD space!

Anyone got any ideas about this?

Cheers,
One Seriously Worried User

 

[contoursvt]

Time Machine maybe? Was the space being lost on a secondary drive?

 

[knapkin]

Not to be picky, but some program was open and writing to disk. A quick look at activity monitor might have shown this.

Executing

sudo find / -size +524288000c

in a terminal will find all files over 500MB.

This might help you locate the files taking up space.

You could also execute

cd /; sudo du -h -d 1

This will give a listing of directories and the size of their contents. You can then go into each directory one at a time to find the space eating files (this is in the case that somthing wrote a ton of small files).

If you are not friendly with terminal, I'm sorry, but I'm not friendly with finder, so I don't know of a gui way to do this sort of thing.

 

[weckart]

Whatsize is the gui app you need

http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

 

[chriswheat]

After a restart everything is back to normal, except I am out 400GB of HDD space!

What else were you trying to fix with a restart? You said "everything is back to normal." What wasn't normal besides the 400GB loss?

 

[markfc]

give this bad boy a go!

http://www.derlien.com/

 

[djc6]

This is another utility to help you figure out where the space went:

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

 

[Santabean2000]

Thanks!

Whatsize is the gui app you need

http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

Just what the doctor ordered. What a great app, so quick to sort out the files. Turns out:

FileSync _iDisk.sparsebundle bands =1114 8MB files!

Any ideas where they came from?


Cheers for all your help so far.

 

[Santabean2000]

So, there are now two iDisks that have appeared. One is mine, but the other has 1.7TB of storage! - Definitely not mine. Why would I be seeing that?

Anyway, my comp is trying sync with that, hence the 400GB of space being eaten away.

How do I get rid of that?

 

[treblah]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306904

It's a bug.

 

[Santabean2000]

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306904

It's a bug.

Mmmmm... but it's NOT my iDisk. Why do I have somebody else's iDisk, (with my name)?

Also whenever I choose iDisk, (to stop it syncing), from System Pref. it just hangs. Is this a Leopard thing?