what happened to my hard drive Space?!?!
 

Ok so i'm using an ibook g4 1.42ghz running 10.4.9. SO yesterday I had ~20gb of free space and i put my computer to sleep over night and woke it up and i now have only 8 gb's of free space and after restarting it and running some cache cleaning and repairing permissions ect.. and then restarting again....... i still have no more space so where did all my hd space go?

edit: ok... so what I have done is added up alll the folders that I can find and i should have ~20gb of free space .... but I DON"t? where did it go

Did you put it to sleep, or start a screensaver? If it was sleeping, it shouldn't have done anything. What's running in Activity Monitor?

I closed the screen and it went to sleep
not many things are running and i still have plenty of ram
and the disk usage tab shows the same space that Cmd-i on the hd does

Use OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/ to find out what is using up your hard drive space.

If it turns out to be a log file, tell us what message(s) are repeated over an over in that file.

Trevor

ok then omnidisksweeper list users as the biggest folder then
it says its taking up 48.8 gb
ok.... then it lists music 18.7 gb, desktop 12.6 gb, picture 12.4 gb, library 3.2 gb, movies 1.5 gb, then when I add in the other library folder 6.2gb, applications 13.3 gb, and System Folder 1.6gb ok so doing the math subtracting from my formated hd capacity of 92 gb i get 22.1 free gb no other folder is a gb in size and there aren't enough megabite size folders to account for the missing 14.1 gb.

In the Finder, press shift-command-G and go to folder /tmp
Is there anything large in there?

nope there is nothing over 4kb in there

Try the alternative way of seeing where the disk space is going:
Open a Terminal window (Terminal is under /Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command:
sudo du -x -h -d 1 /
Look to see which sub-folder is taking up the most space and repeat with that folder. If you have trouble interpreting the results, just copy & paste them back here and we can help.

(This method will work in cases where utilities like OmniDiskSweeper fail to show where the disk space is going - i.e. the case where the files are in folders that you don't have permission to read. Note that the 'du' command may take several minutes to finish, so be sure to wait until you get the prompt back.)

The terminal run says that my /Library is taking up 38 gigs
OmniDiskSweeper says Library is only taking up well it isn't even listed
so i don't like the fact that my library is taking up 38 gigs of space and after sizing up both libraries the one in the HD folder is the larger by alot!
and i mean i deleted and moved tons of stuff to my exterior hd in an effort to make more space and well then tonight i start up limewire and a bittorent client come back niegh 20 many later and i'm getting notices that i have no hd space i had 14.76 gb of free space when I restarted my computer this morning where did it goo????

and 39 gb for users.... not sure if thats normal....
0B /.com_symantec_symfs_private
180M /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
512B /.vol
12G /Applications
1.0K /automount
3.5M /bin
0B /cores
12K /Desktop
512B /dev
38G /Library
512B /Network
268K /Notes
177M /private
2.2M /sbin
1.6G /System
39G /Users
481M /usr
16K /Volumes
91G /

Note that Symantec software in general doesn't have a very good reputation on OS X - especially not on Tiger. Which Symantec software do you have installed?


Let's "zoom in" on these two top-level folders - show us the results of the following two commands:

sudo du -x -h -d 1 /Library
sudo du -x -h -d 1 /Users

And if the results from those give you some indication about which sub-folders of those two folders are taking up the most space, then please go ahead and similarly "zoom in" on those sub-folders, etc.

well thats just the thing I deleted norton because it was slowly eating up my hd space and i was pretty sure that I had eradicated it but maybe not anyways i'm running those terminal commands at the moment and would it help if i run Tech Tool Pro over night and defrag my HD? but that can wait right now i'll post the terminal results

Library
128K /Library/Address Book Plug-Ins
0B /Library/Application Enhancers
5.9G /Library/Application Support
1.4G /Library/Audio
1.4M /Library/Automator
22M /Library/Caches
8.6M /Library/CFMSupport
24K /Library/Colors
39M /Library/ColorSync
7.2M /Library/Components
2.2M /Library/Contextual Menu Items
33M /Library/Desktop Pictures
144M /Library/Dictionaries
383M /Library/Documentation
0B /Library/Filesystems
836K /Library/FirstClass
217M /Library/Fonts
29M /Library/Frameworks
28G /Library/Google
0B /Library/Graphics
29M /Library/Image Capture
384K /Library/InputManagers
5.1M /Library/Internet Plug-Ins
0B /Library/iTunes
4.0K /Library/Java
0B /Library/Keyboard Layouts
28K /Library/Keychains
0B /Library/LaunchAgents
8.0K /Library/LaunchDaemons
724K /Library/Logs
64K /Library/Mail
1.8M /Library/Modem Scripts
4.0K /Library/Mozilla
472M /Library/Packages
548K /Library/PDF Services
4.0K /Library/Perl
1.6M /Library/PreferencePanes
5.3M /Library/Preferences
1.5G /Library/Printers
1.7M /Library/Privoxy
8.0K /Library/Python
4.0K /Library/Qt
15M /Library/QuickTime
205M /Library/Receipts
3.9M /Library/Screen Savers
76K /Library/ScriptingAdditions
2.9M /Library/Scripts
4.3M /Library/Services
2.0M /Library/Spotlight
12K /Library/StartupItems
4.4M /Library/Tor
256K /Library/User Pictures
20K /Library/Vidalia
172K /Library/WebServer
12M /Library/Widgets
38G /Library
GAhhh google is eating my brains
Users:
38G /Users/M*****
212K /Users/Shared
38G /Users

Google:
28G /Library/Google/Google Desktop
28G /Library/Google

Users M**************
4.0K /Users/Matthew/.adobe
4.0K /Users/Matthew/.critter
256K /Users/Matthew/.gimp-2.2
12K /Users/Matthew/.hsoftdata
612K /Users/Matthew/.jbidwatcher
24K /Users/Matthew/.jmf
4.0K /Users/Matthew/.MacOSX
4.0K /Users/Matthew/.mplayer
4.0K /Users/Matthew/.nicotine
12K /Users/Matthew/.psi
4.0K /Users/Matthew/.ssh
64K /Users/Matthew/.thumbnails
1.1M /Users/Matthew/.tor
78M /Users/Matthew/.Trash
60K /Users/Matthew/.vidalia
3.9M /Users/Matthew/.wapi
24K /Users/Matthew/.xnap
131M /Users/Matthew/Applications
4.0K /Users/Matthew/bidnobble
4.3G /Users/Matthew/Desktop
153M /Users/Matthew/Documents
8.0K /Users/Matthew/Incomplete
2.7G /Users/Matthew/Library
13M /Users/Matthew/Magazines
8.0K /Users/Matthew/Movies
19G /Users/Matthew/Music
12G /Users/Matthew/Pictures
8.0K /Users/Matthew/Public
8.0K /Users/Matthew/Shared
16M /Users/Matthew/Sites
12K /Users/Matthew/ventrilo
38G /Users/Matthew
oh screw it, it ain't worth taking my name out anyways those sizes in users make sense but that google is still really wierd
but when i go into the folder for that and size everything up with CMD-I it doesn't say anything close to that.... hidden folders maybe? and because i can't see that its taking up that much space i can't delete it. Although i'm going to go ahead and see if google desktop has an unistall function.

YAAYAYAYYAY I did it i uninstalled google desktop and now I have 30 gb of free space!!!! ayayayayayayayayyayayyyayayayayyayyyyyayaay!!!
Hayne I am forever indebted to you and now i hate google for not telling me there would be evil space consuming indexes ><

ummm, can someone please explain what happened here, and how i can check to see if it's happening to me?
ta,
paul.
p.s, i'm a dummy, so baby steps, please.

Google Desktop is a relatively new release from Google which acts rather like Spotlight (though it isn't supposed to interfere with Spotlight) to index the contents of your drive and allow you to quickly locate files and folders (as well as do google web searches). In order to do this, it produces its own index of your disk. Obviously, to judge for sishcabob30's experience, these index files can be larger than expected. If you installed the Google Desktop for the Mac, you may experience similar problems. I think that, for the Mac at least, this is a "Not-Ready-for Prime-Time" product. But using Google doesn't automatically install the desktop search feature; that is a separate installation. If you didn't actively install it, you have nothing to concern yourself about.

Joe VanZandt

sensational!
thanks for that joe.
paul.

This is an excellent example of how the power of Unix commands can help a situation out. I had a 98 gig error log in my Linux box a few weeks ago, that was in a hidden directory (thanks to a bug in KDE) and I basically used similar code to fix the problem. New software can be buggy, hehe.

I advise people who feel comfortable using the terminal to play around with ls, du, df, because these simple commands generally can do no harm and often yield great results when trying to troubleshoot a problem. Read through Hayne's Unix FAQ to get a feel for it, honestly it does help (but is not required) when using a Mac. Though, do note be careful and try to read up what the command does before excuting. You don't want to go around randomly changing permissions and policies and deleting things you do not know what they are.

here is a very useful link that explains a lot of these BASH commands you find in *Nix distros.

http://www.ss64.com/osx/

You folks must be getting softer as time goes by, giving the hints right off the top rather than requesting the OP do a search of the threads! :D

Ah, a kinder, gentler forum. :)

I'm not quite sure what you are referring to since in an older thread where you were asking a similar question, the same advice was offered off the bat:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=58490

I'm just accustomed to seeing one of the first replies to a question like this as being:

"Have you searched the threads here?"

That's all. I hope I wasn't implying anything else!

Similar question
 

Would love a suggestion on this challenge.

From the "sudo du -x -h -d 1 /" command, I see this as my result:

8.0K /.bzvol
3.1M /.fseventsd
84M /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
0B /.vol
3.5G /Applications
3.9M /bin
0B /cores
4.5K /dev
1.0K /home
4.6G /Library
1.0K /net
0B /Network
5.0G /private
2.6M /sbin
2.3G /System
86G /Users
468M /usr
128G /Volumes
231G /

Thus, how is it possible that the math doesn't add up? With a capacity of 231G, the numbers above (outside of the external volumes/hard drives such as the 128G) don't add up anywhere close to 231. What am I missing? Thanks in advance!

Aside from the methods mentioned here, you can also use the application Grand Perspective to track down exactly what is stored where on your computer, using a graphical interface. Has helped me quite a bit in 'missing hard drive space' situations.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

Your calculator needs new batteries:

3.5G /Applications
4.6G /Library
5.0G /private
2.3G /System
86G /Users
468M /usr
128G /Volumes

= 229 Gb, plus the small stuff plus base 10 / base 2 issues equals about 231 Gb

The final number is not drive capacity, it's the sum of whatever du finds. It also includes files in the searched folder but single files are not listed separately.

Try:

df -h

I think what you are missing is that the "-x" option to 'du' makes it exclude external drives, so that 128 GB in /Volumes is (almost certainly) detritus from some previous incident when a mounted drive was not properly unmounted.

First unmount and physically disconnect all external drives and network drives.
(To be really safe, disconnect all network cables and turn off Airport.)
Then use the menu item "Go to Folder..." from Finder's "Go" menu, and then type in "/Volumes" (without the quotes).

Look at the contents of the /Volumes folder.
If you see anything other than the one entry for your internal drive, that is likely the detritus I spoke of above.

Use Finder to trash the left over folders from /Volumes. (If you are sure that no external disks or network drives are connected then this can't affect what is on the external disks.) Finally, empty the Trash.

I saw that too, but until we know the details (such as whch OS version, and correct sizes of all volumes) I'm assuming that it's adding up an external drive.