MacBook Air - Lion - StartUP Disk Full - With 140GB free
I am currently using TimeMachine and have been having problems with TimeMachine Backups completing. I have just switched to a new TimeMachine backup disk and will see if the problem goes away if I complete the backup.
I currently have 143GB of 256GB SSD free yet Terminal reports that my startup drive is almost full. This causes Spotlight to erase the index and rebuild itself.
I am still trying to diagnose this. Erasing files in Trash seems to take forever. I have just uninstalled Adobe CS4 to push free space up to 158GB - I am off to the Apple Store tomorrow for some expert assistance. Therefore I unregistered and uninstalled CS$. The problem is the machine froze in the middle of uninstalling. I also have kept finder open and have seen the startup disk full message and switched to finder to see My disk free space drop to 50GB and 80GB and then back up to 140GB in a matter of seconds. Very weird.
This message seems to trigger spotlight to erase it's index and rebuild. But Spotlight shouldn't be taking 140GB to index 110GB of files (including the OS) but the machine seems in a vicious cycle. The error comes up. The index is deleted. It immediately reindexes for 8-10 hours. The message comes up again and it repeats the cycle.
I did go in to Terminal and check preferences because one of the errors referred to the scroll back buffers in Terminal. These were set to use available memory. I have changed this initially to 1,000 lines and then to 200 lines but this doesn't seem to have made a difference.
I am wondering if there is a bug in the code that is looking at Disks03 - the pseudo recovery CD which is 650MB and is basically full.
I have also looked at the disk volumes and see that the time machine backup is attached via localhost. But it is connected to /Volumes. The /.MobileBackups folder seems to store lots of copies of backups. However, my backup to TimeCapsule is now working and my MacBook Air is backed up over the network. So there shouldn't be files hanging around waiting to be backed up.
Sorry for the rambling but I figure there are a number of people suffering with this weird error where they have plenty of diskspace so the more information shared - the more likely we are to close in on the real culprit.
Is it something in the 10.7.2 LION Update since this condition is only a recent phenomenon.