Startup Disk Full...but why?

Run the maintenance scripts
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Gamer787 said:

Ok, I have a 120GB Air, and it is beginning to get full. So I cleared out pretty much everything in my Finder. (Literally, just about 2GB of music and my Apps are the only thing left) No movies, nothing. But I still only have 10GB free.

How can I clear up some more room? I don't know what else to delete and it's very frustrating.

Click to expand...

If Time Machine is ON but no external drive is available it stores backups on your local hard drive. Check that first. If you have an external drive, connect it and do a backup. Use Omnidisksweeper to find other big stores of files.

Stewart21 said:

If Time Machine is ON but no external drive is available it stores backups on your local hard drive. Check that first. If you have an external drive, connect it and do a backup. Use Omnidisksweeper to find other big stores of files.

Click to expand...

Wait, what good is a time machine being on your startup disk? If that fails, then you loose your recovery too.

While it's not useful for a complete drive failure, a local Time Machine backup is convenient if you want to revert to an older version of a particular file.

For some people, having an hourly local backup is useful, a poor/sloppy man's undelete so to speak.

It does not replace a backup to an external drive. The oft-repeated conventional wisdom from old-school system administrators is that if it's worth backing up, it's worth backing up at least twice. Ideally, at least one backup would be to an offsite location (cloud, physical disc, tape backup once upon a time).

Since notebook computers often aren't connected to external peripheral drives -- including ones explicitly designated for backup purposes, having a local backup is better than nothing.

The time machine backups to local disk is used when the system isn't able to locate the drive normally used by time machine, such as when traveling / disconnected from your home network.

for starters, TM backups should always be to an external drive, as someone has already mentioned.

it's possible that your sleep image is huge, so you can always try this:

open Terminal (in ‘other’ or Utilities)
copy and paste each ‘sudo’ command one at a time and hit ‘Enter’
it’ll ask you for your password the first time.
if one of the last 2 commands doesn’t work it’s no biggie.
restart and you should be fine

Set sleep mode in shell:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Remove the image:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Create a blanked file:

sudo touch /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Make file immutable:

sudo chflags uchg /private/var/vm/sleepimage

http://www.derlien.com/dixforum/viewtopic.php?t=62

Try this, it will scan your drive and tell you what is taking up all the space.

It can't scan other users Home folders though.

An alternative to Disk Inventory X is Omnidisksweeper, my preference as I like numbers instead of colors.

As an aside, have you emptied Trash?

halledise said:

for starters, TM backups should always be to an external drive, as someone has already mentioned.

it's possible that your sleep image is huge, so you can always try this:

open Terminal (in ‘other’ or Utilities)
copy and paste each ‘sudo’ command one at a time and hit ‘Enter’
it’ll ask you for your password the first time.
if one of the last 2 commands doesn’t work it’s no biggie.
restart and you should be fine

Set sleep mode in shell:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Remove the image:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Create a blanked file:

sudo touch /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Make file immutable:

sudo chflags uchg /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Click to expand...

That's what I thought. I just don't see the benefit to using disk space (which on an Air is valuable. It should be TM'd on an external drive and accessible remotely if needed.

My only question to you is, must you type the sudo command by itself or can you jump straight to checking the size of the sleep image?

You don't need sudo privileges to do an 'ls' on /var/vm.

The sleep image is the size of your computer's RAM. An 8GB MacBook Air will have an 8GB sleep image.

Based on your comment, it doesn't appear that you know what a sleep image is: it's a quick, easily-accessinble disk-based snapshot of what was in main memory at the time of sleep. It's used by the computer for a quick restoration of the computer's status: programs, processes, documents.

Just checking, but you did remember to actually empty the Trash bin, right?

Are you syncing your Iphone to Itunes on this machine?

If you are you should check whether your Iphone backups are taking the space.

I found this problem on another 128GB Mac Air before.

I'm more of a command-line guy. Open a terminal and type:


This will show the size in GB of all folders on your startup disk. Mine shows something like this:


Obviously the biggest hog is the users folder. You can cd into that, then repeat the command:


Keep repeating until you found the biggest hog.

Command line stuff is great - my usage of du is "du -sk * |sort -rn" which provides a sorted list of top disk hogs in the current directory.

One more plug for omni disk sweeper - I just ran this on one of my boxes and very much like the output. Show me the numbers. You can keep drilling into directories until you find what you're looking for.

Alex8 said:

Are you syncing your Iphone to Itunes on this machine?

If you are you should check whether your Iphone backups are taking the space.

I found this problem on another 128GB Mac Air before.

Click to expand...

That would show under backups, not other. Correct?

Possibly a hidden library filling up the drive

I had a similar problem a couple of months ago. The culprit was AdobeRevel, which made backups in a hidden library of all the files I uploaded to the AdobeRevel-cloud. It was really confusing, since the program made a non-hidden library in the images-folder of the user account, and created a hidden library as well. In the program you could deactivate the option to make local copies of all files uploaded. But this option only had effect on the 'visible' library, the files were still backed up in the hidden library - it became really a problem after uploading 50-60GB of pictures to the cloud. (The hidden folder with the backups had to be deleted to free space up again.)

Took a while to figure this out.

I think you can make the hidden libraries visible by holding down the option key while browsing the user account folder in finder.

When this happened to me it was Flash, which every time I watched. YouTube vid, would add a 1gig swap file.