10.3.5 and missing hard drive space

[homeshire]

i just installed 10.3.5. then i repaired permissions. while doing that, i noticed that i had but 816 mb of available space. last i knew, i still had 33 gb, give or take. it's not something i track religiously, so i don't know that it disappeared immediately after this update, but i gotta wonder. where did 30+gb of hard drive space go??? anyone with a clue? thanks

 

[Horrortaxi]

I actually gained a few hundred megabytes.

If you restart your computer do you get your space back?

 

[titaniumducky]

i just installed 10.3.5. then i repaired permissions. while doing that, i noticed that i had but 816 mb of available space. last i knew, i still had 33 gb, give or take. it's not something i track religiously, so i don't know that it disappeared immediately after this update, but i gotta wonder. where did 30+gb of hard drive space go??? anyone with a clue? thanks

If the space doesn't come back after a restart (which I'm assuming it hasn't) you probably really have used that much space without realizing it.

One time a similar thing happened to me. It turned out that I had a few movies ripped from DVDs to watch, and a macosxhints suggestion for that "rm -rf" scare went wrong.

Anyways, download OmniDiskSweeper. It searches through all your folders and lists files/folders in order of their size, so you can see where all that space went. Then you can delete the culprit!

However, if there's no culprit (which hopefully won't happen), you might have a serious problem; the only thing I can think of to fix this in that case would be a clean install.

 

[benny.c]

This happened to me the other day (before the update). I had about 80G spare and then suddenly this dropped to 25G (I had an error message saying my machine was running low on memory when doing some rendering). I went through my bigger folders and using 'get info' checked that the folders in them roughly added up to the size indicated.

I found that my home folder was responsible and the folders in it didn't add up to anywhere near what was indicated as being in the folder. I noticed that the folder hadn't been indexed for ages and not really having a clue what else to do I performed an index. Anyhoo, long story short, that sorted it.

 

[homeshire]

if anyone's listening, i pinned the culprit down to the library folder on the root drive. couldn't pin it down more closely without devoting much time to analyzing everything within the folder. so as an utter act of desperation, i ran CacheOut X, ordering it to delete just about everthing it could lay its hands on. after reboot, had reclaimed about 30 gb of space, and the library folder had dropped from 33+gb to 3+gb. i figure it's still holding on to about 2 gb of space for no reason. but i can live with it without freaking.

i'd like to index and all, but it's so damn butt-slow i give it an hour, see its progress and decide the hell with it. once i tried letting it index the hard drive overnight. i don't remember details, it having been so long ago, but i remember getting po'd that it didn't complete, or had crashed, or something so that even overnight i didn't get an index in the morning. how important is indexing the hard drive anyway??? ah well.

 

[titaniumducky]

if anyone's listening, i pinned the culprit down to the library folder on the root drive. couldn't pin it down more closely without devoting much time to analyzing everything within the folder. so as an utter act of desperation, i ran CacheOut X, ordering it to delete just about everthing it could lay its hands on. after reboot, had reclaimed about 30 gb of space, and the library folder had dropped from 33+gb to 3+gb. i figure it's still holding on to about 2 gb of space for no reason. but i can live with it without freaking.

i'd like to index and all, but it's so damn butt-slow i give it an hour, see its progress and decide the hell with it. once i tried letting it index the hard drive overnight. i don't remember details, it having been so long ago, but i remember getting po'd that it didn't complete, or had crashed, or something so that even overnight i didn't get an index in the morning. how important is indexing the hard drive anyway??? ah well.

My root library folder is about 9 GBs!

What's this about indexing my hard drive? I've never heard that you're supposed to do that. Doesn't it do it automatically? Mine says it was last done May 23, 2004 at 10:22 AM.

I always assumed that OS X indexed files on the fly as you use them and such. I've never manually indexed my hard drive, so it has do something automatically.

 

[mkrishnan]

My root lib folder is 1.25 gigs.... still seems like rather a lot, no? But anyway, I'm not going to touch it for now, I guess. I seemed to get back about half a gig during the update too, but it was half a gig that mysteriously disappeared. Probably just cuz the swap file was deleted or rotated....

 

[benny.c]

My root library folder is about 9 GBs!

What's this about indexing my hard drive? I've never heard that you're supposed to do that. Doesn't it do it automatically? Mine says it was last done May 23, 2004 at 10:22 AM.

I always assumed that OS X indexed files on the fly as you use them and such. I've never manually indexed my hard drive, so it has do something automatically.

That's what i understood was supposed to happen but noticed 2 of my biggest folders had never been indexed. In fact the date last done was july 2001 which was way before my computer was born

 

[yellow]

Probably just cuz the swap file was deleted or rotated....

Swap lives in /var/vm/

People's /Library varying in size is completely normal. /Library/Application Support/ can be one culprit. /Library/Documentation/ is another. It purely depends on what apps you have installed. /Library/Printers/ will also vary in size, depending on which printer drivers you have installed. So, varying /Library sizes is normal.

How much RAM have you got Homeshire?

Indexing the hard drive means faster finds when using the Finder to find files.