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Woke up this morning and Macbook Pro Harddrive is completely full??

M

MBM007

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 6, 2006
145
1
Boulder
Not exactly sure what happened, but I think it has something to do with the new iPhoto?? I booted it for the 1st time off my external drive to create a X-Mas Card and imported 4 photos into it. Don't know if after opening it, it attempted to import all the photos from my external drive to my internal drive?? Don't know why it would do that but there is no sign of it in the Pictures folder.
Any ideas??
Only other thing I did was sync my iPad, so I went into my backups and deleted all those files and it freed up 16gb.....I started last night with 44 gb and don't know where in the f the rest of my space went??
I've used DriveSlim to attempt to find any wasted space, but nothing turned up

Is there a way to see specifically what happened last night?? I have Time Machine running

I've restarted my comp, and still stuck around 16gbs......clueless as to where this Hard-drive space is being used.

I've gone thru all my main folders (pictures, music, movies, etc...) and its not being wasted their....has to be hiding somewhere in my Library or what??
 
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Something really strange is going on..... I just left my machine a couple hours ago with 18gb of free space and now it only has 14gb......what on earth could be going on??

Thanks in advance for any suggestions
 
now its down to 12gb after not touching it since my last post.....any ideas what is going on??
 
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Do you have any virus software installed, at my previous employer there was a big issue with mcafee creating large log files.

You could try downloading one of the free tools from the apple website for disk utilities to check out space as previous posters have mentioned.

Unless you give us all the installed programs and root access it's a bit difficult to diagnose remotely ;)
 
As other users have recommended, it would definitely be a good idea to use one of the utilities that have been posted to see which files are taking up a lot of space. I would make note of certain files that you might suspect are the culprits, and monitor (using those utilities) whether they are in fact the growing files.
 
I use DaisyDisk to figure out what's filling up my hard drive. Its pretty interesting how way it lays out the info.

Another note, mail.app freaked out on my wife's MBP a few months back. It started to constantly download things until the hard drive was full. The only thing we could do was use a different mail program and eventually reinstalled OS X when we had time. DaisyDisk will help you figure out if something like this is happening.
 
charliex5 said:
I use DaisyDisk to figure out what's filling up my hard drive. Its pretty interesting how way it lays out the info.

Another note, mail.app freaked out on my wife's MBP a few months back. It started to constantly download things until the hard drive was full. The only thing we could do was use a different mail program and eventually reinstalled OS X when we had time. DaisyDisk will help you figure out if something like this is happening.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion.....I have DaisyDisk running right now, but can already tell its my Mac Mail app thats suckin up all my space. Yesterday it was at 53gb now its at 72gb. I have about a thousand emails in there but it shouldn't be anywhere near 73gb's. Its set up to pull in my gmail via IMAP and my gmail gets email forwarded from my hotmail account that I've had for 15 years but still have people emailing it (despite constantly telling them I've been using gmail for the past 4 years)

Any ideas how to clean up my my mail account?? I assume its only really at about 4-6gbs.....so I have 65gb or so wasted in there.

UPDATE: DaisyDisk finished (great program btw) and I have 65gb's of recovered messages from my Gmail account.....went thru a couple of them and they all seem to be outgoing messages of pictures/videos that failed because they were bigger than Gmail's mb limit. For some reason, it seems like Mac Mail keeps attempting to push them thru Gmail anyways and keeps creating backups everytime they fail....eventually taking over the whole hard-drive (my wife tried sending out a 432mb 1080p video we recorded of our daughter the other day and I had about 30 copies of it in this folder).....any idea how to stop Mail from doing this??
 
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MBM007 said:
Thanks for the suggestion.....I have DaisyDisk running right now, but can already tell its my Mac Mail app thats suckin up all my space. Yesterday it was at 53gb now its at 72gb. I have about a thousand emails in there but it shouldn't be anywhere near 73gb's. Its set up to pull in my gmail via IMAP and my gmail gets email forwarded from my hotmail account that I've had for 15 years but still have people emailing it (despite constantly telling them I've been using gmail for the past 4 years)

Any ideas how to clean up my my mail account?? I assume its only really at about 4-6gbs.....so I have 65gb or so wasted in there.

UPDATE: DaisyDisk finished (great program btw) and I have 65gb's of recovered messages from my Gmail account.....went thru a couple of them and they all seem to be outgoing messages of pictures/videos that failed because they were bigger than Gmail's mb limit. For some reason, it seems like Mac Mail keeps attempting to push them thru Gmail anyways and keeps creating backups everytime they fail....eventually taking over the whole hard-drive (my wife tried sending out a 432mb 1080p video we recorded of our daughter the other day and I had about 30 copies of it in this folder).....any idea how to stop Mail from doing this??
Click to expand...

I could be wrong, but I think it has to do with how IMAP accounts work in general. When you have a failed message, it'll store it in Drafts or Sent with a failed tag and try again later. Under Preferences, what are you options for Sent Messages in the Mailbox Behaviors tab of your Gmail Account (under the Accounts heading)? Maybe if you store these sent messages on the server and/or delete them after a certain interval, it'll shrink your mail folder.
 
dissolve said:
I could be wrong, but I think it has to do with how IMAP accounts work in general. When you have a failed message, it'll store it in Drafts or Sent with a failed tag and try again later. Under Preferences, what are you options for Sent Messages in the Mailbox Behaviors tab of your Gmail Account (under the Accounts heading)? Maybe if you store these sent messages on the server and/or delete them after a certain interval, it'll shrink your mail folder.
Click to expand...

Its set on the default settings "store sent messages on the server" and the drafts is set the same way......don't really know what it means but I would love to not have to go into my recovered folder and delete things.....wish if I tried sending something too big I could just delete it from the mail app itself.
 
I'm glad you liked DaisyDisk. Like I said before, we couldn't figure out what to do. I cleared out all the mail messages and had it redownload everything but it just started doing it again. My wife ended up using a third party mail app until I had time to reinstall OS X. After that it worked fine, so there just must be a little glitch somewhere in the app. She was also sending out fairly large PDFs which was most likely what was piling up.
 
Tell Mail not to store draft messages on the server. That's a recommendation Google specifically makes, in part to avoid this exact issue.

jW
 
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