Where is my disc space...?!?!

[mikebatho]

I'm out on a job working on a G5 with an 80gb hard drive.

There's about 3 gb of work on the desktop, and the usual amount of OSX software on there for graphics.

The bottom of the HD window says there's only 6gb of space left.

I've done appleI on every folder in the HD (Apps, Os9, Osx, System etc) and can't make up even a third of that space.

How do I find out what the heck is taking up all my memory?!?!?!?

 

[mad jew]

Use an app like OmniDiskSweeper in an administrator account.

 

[mikebatho]

Will it sweep all the work from my desktop....?

 

[mad jew]

Nope.

It'll just show you where the space is being used.

 

[mikebatho]

Ok, having a look now.....cheers.......

Hope I don't delete anything important!!!

 

[mad jew]

Feel free to ask here before deleting anything that you haven't created yourself. Good luck.

 

[mikebatho]

OK, I've done a sweep. Can still only locate 25gb of stuff.

Am I missing something here...??????

 

[mad jew]

This was run in an admin account, right?

 

[mikebatho]

Erm, not sure. Just ran it on the machine as I use it here.....

Is there something more I need to do...?

How do I set up an Admin account...?

 

[mad jew]

The first account you set up would have been an admin account by default. It tells you whether it's an admin account in the Accounts pane of System Preferences.

 

[robbieduncan]

If you don't know then you are probably running as admin!

How long since your last reboot? How much RAM do you have. There is a minor possibility that you have a load of paging files taking up lots of space. Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) and type ls -l /var/vm and post the results here...

 

[mikebatho]

Last login: Tue Jun 6 10:09:45 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Cyril-Lyons-Computer:~ cyrillyons$ ls -l /var/vm
total 262144
drwx--x--x 14 root wheel 476 15 Feb 17:15 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 6 Jun 08:56 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 67108864 6 Jun 09:24 swapfile1
Cyril-Lyons-Computer:~ cyrillyons$



Yep, I'm already running admin......

 

[robbieduncan]

Damn, I'm a silly one as I now can't remember what ls -l on OSX returns the file size in (is it blocks, bytes, kilobytes...)

Do this instead:

du -h /var/vm

Which should report the disk usage of the virtual memory folder in human readable form.

 

[mikebatho]

Last login: Tue Jun 6 10:16:34 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Cyril-Lyons-Computer:~ cyrillyons$ du -h /var/vm
du: /var/vm/app_profile: Permission denied
128M /var/vm
Cyril-Lyons-Computer:~ cyrillyons$

 

[robbieduncan]

Cyril-Lyons-Computer:~ cyrillyons$ du -h /var/vm
du: /var/vm/app_profile: Permission denied
128M /var/vm

Well that's not it then!

 

[mikebatho]

I'm confused.

I'm not really a hardware kinda fella, I just run the software.....

Obviously it holds you back when you have next to no space on the machine.....

 

[mikebatho]

No ideas...?

My machine is running like a dead pig, and I have to back every job up individually, as there isn't the space to store them on the computer...

Grrrrrrr

 

[thumb]

i find this program very useful:

Disk Inventory X (http://www.derlien.com/).

it will give you a graphical representation of where your data is.

are there other accounts on your computer?

 

[bbrosemer]

If you download any torrents or any type of P2P files OS X recgonizes the final size of the file rather then the actual amount that you have downloaded. Just incase you are doing any of that ....

 

[robbieduncan]

If you download any torrents or any type of P2P files OS X recgonizes the final size of the file rather then the actual amount that you have downloaded. Just incase you are doing any of that ....

Depends on your setup. You can have Azureus reserve all the space for a torrent to download into in which case the file is really that big. Or you can have it grab the space as it needs it.

 

[bbrosemer]

Just a suggestion because that is the inital setup on azureus, that it allocates the space during the inital downloading.

 

[Carson]

Id run disk utility and see what that does, before I learned how to acctauly organize anything on my computer I had every thing on the desktop and it ****ed every thing up. Id just put every thing on a external and whipe the drive.

 

[66217]

Just make sure your Trash isn't full.

 

[spacehog371]

my powerbook was eating my disk space daily... i had to do a clean install to fix it.

 

[wako]

Mike, are you sure you allowed OmniSweeper to scan through everything? It usually takes awhile before its done scanning through it all.


I had the same problem, and I used OmniSweeper which was able to detect a hidden folder that was under the /vol. This happened to me because I had disconnected my external HDD while downloading. With OSX being retarded or the program (i blame OSX because on Windows it would have stopped all programs using the external), it just created a fake volume directory for the download to complete.