~100gb lost drive space?

[Ragnar-Kon]

Last night I was using Compressor to transcode a file. About 85% of the way through, Compressor crashed... and seems to have left a phantom temporary file about 100gb in size somewhere on my hard disk.

According to my own math, and the math of several drive-cleaning software packages (Disk Doctor, OmniDriveSweeper, etc.), I should have 96.5 GB of used drive space. This is consistent with what I remember from last week. Yet OS X reports that I have used 199.61 GB of my drive space. Meaning somewhere, somehow, there is a phantom file somewhere roughly 100 GB in size.

So... any ideas on how to find and remove this temporary file? It is cramping my style (and my hard disk 😉 ).

 

[Ragnar-Kon]

Never mind, disregard.

The missing drive space was in the .MobileBackup folder. Apparently OS X starts creating Time Machine backups as it is working, even if the backup drive is no where to be found.

My backup drive was 500 miles away, no where to be found... but apparently OS X started preparing the temporary Compressor file for backup. Dumb, but okay.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Never mind, disregard.

The missing drive space was in the .MobileBackup folder. Apparently OS X starts creating Time Machine backups as it is working, even if the backup drive is no where to be found.

My backup drive was 500 miles away, no where to be found... but apparently OS X started preparing the temporary Compressor file for backup. Dumb, but okay.

ONLY if the Backup drive is nowhere to be found, actually

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

 

[Ragnar-Kon]

ONLY if the Backup drive is nowhere to be found, actually

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

Wouldn't be that big of a deal if OS X automatically deleted the snapshot. But when I tried to transcode the file a second time, I couldn't without running out of disk space.

Anyway, just in case someone comes across this thread with a search engine. It is a common problem that I've encountered before. I just didn't know that it occurred even without the presence of a backup disk. The solution is to turn Time Machine off and then back on again. That'll clear out the temp file.

 

[Weaselboy]

ONLY if the Backup drive is nowhere to be found, actually

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878

I see the wording in the link implies that, but that is not how it works. You can test it yourself and see. Attach your TM disk and run a backup. Then copy a couple GB of data to the desktop then drag it to the trash and empty the trash. Now check /.Mobilebackups and you will see that data is now in the folder. This happens whether the backup disk is present or not.

I think what the article is trying to day is the data is put there for when your TM disk is not available and you want to access the data.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Wouldn't be that big of a deal if OS X automatically deleted the snapshot. But when I tried to transcode the file a second time, I couldn't without running out of disk space.

Anyway, just in case someone comes across this thread with a search engine. It is a common problem that I've encountered before. I just didn't know that it occurred even without the presence of a backup disk. The solution is to turn Time Machine off and then back on again. That'll clear out the temp file.

A good idea is to exclude a specific location in Time Machine preferences (personally I exclude Desktop) and transcode to there. Then once it's the way you want it, move it to its final destination where TM will pick it up.

This applies even if the backup disk IS attached, just to save backing up the data twice and filling up your backup disk.