User profile is much larger than sum of its parts

I just replaced my boot hard drive with an SSD drive, and had to move my user profile to a different drive to make enough room to be able to use Super Duper to copy it to the new drive. When I was moving data, I found that my user profile was shown to be 500GB or so, but yet the data inside was about 30GB smaller. I moved everything I could out of there, but when it was all gone, I was still left with that 30GB delta. At this point, I have a folder that is no longer my user profile, but is 34GB. The folders inside add up to about 1GB. How can I figure out where this space is supposedly being taken up? I have repaired permissions and verified disk, but no errors are reported (except a few about java files, which it doesn't seem to want to fix). I'm happy to post any logs or try anything. I'm a long time computer user but not all that technical with the Mac.

Any advice appreciated! I need to reclaim this 30GB right away!

Thanks

Mal said:

Grab a copy of OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective (I prefer the first, but it's a matter of personal preference really), and have it scan the folder. Likely there's some hidden files taking up the space.

Both of those programs are free, btw (can't remember if GrandPerspective is freeware or shareware, but you can at least use it for this without having to pay).

jW

Click to expand...

Thanks! OmniDiskSweeper showed that I had a folder called .Trash in that folder that was 34GB of old stuff that I was able to delete. The program itself couldn't delete it (even though it said it did), but I changed permissions repeatedly and finally got it delete using chown and rm -rf * using terminal. I had been completely forgetting about "ls -alh" to see the hidden files! Thanks again, now my SSD drive has half its free space!