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1TB Hard drive FULL with 'other'?

sneil2

sneil2

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 21, 2010
48
0
Lancashire, England
Someone please help me before I wipe and start again. Screen grab below of my available hard drive space. ;)

7 days ago I had over 500GB of space free, this morning I had less than 1GB! My boyfriend watched the footie on some probably illegal website at the weekend and I fear he's done something to it as the hard drive is now FULL with 'other' (whatever that means). :eek:

I've managed to empty my mail boxes some old music and films I don't need any more and free up this 100GB that's now showing as available.

Does anyone know what this 'other' is? And could it be a virus from his watching the footie on a dodgy website?
Any help or ideas is much appreciated as I feel I will have to erase the disk altogether and start a fresh :(
 

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1. After you took a backup of the most important things.

2. ONYX You could run this free program that might clear out any temporary video stored.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

3. You could also run this tool, which takes away a recent malware that you might not, or might have.

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/1...tool-for-macs-running-os-x-lion-without-java/

4. You probably do not need to start fresh. But it is possible to do it if you want to. It is easy, through the App Store.
 
sneil2 said:
Someone please help me before I wipe and start again. Screen grab below of my available hard drive space. ;)

7 days ago I had over 500GB of space free, this morning I had less than 1GB! My boyfriend watched the footie on some probably illegal website at the weekend and I fear he's done something to it as the hard drive is now FULL with 'other' (whatever that means). :eek:

I've managed to empty my mail boxes some old music and films I don't need any more and free up this 100GB that's now showing as available.

Does anyone know what this 'other' is? And could it be a virus from his watching the footie on a dodgy website?
Any help or ideas is much appreciated as I feel I will have to erase the disk altogether and start a fresh :(
Click to expand...

Tell your boyfriend to download less porn. No, really.

P.S. AFAIK, 'other' means that the data is not in a folder where OS X can tell anythign about it. I have 90% of my files classified as 'other' because I structure my files the way I want them.
 
OmniDiskSweeper is a good program for hunting down those excess files.

I had a similar problem a couple years ago; hidden files were taking over the hard drive. With OmniDiskSweeper, I was able to find the hidden files, search for the extension online, then search for anyone else having a similar problem.

Turns out the installer for a popular game expansion had a rare glitch that could cause the Unix backup process to start spitting out massive log files. Fortunately there were instructions on how to kill the malfunctioning process, and I could safely delete the files with OmniDiskSweeper.
 
Best thing is probably to get a program to show you what directories contain all the extra data.

I have had good experiences using both DaisyDisk and Disk Inventory X. I prefer the former's display and GUI, but it's $10, while the latter is free and still works well.

I think either one will probably point you to what's taking up all your drive space.

Regards,
Brian
 
leman said:
Tell your boyfriend to download less porn. No, really.
Click to expand...

LMFAO! That's exactly what I said to him last night but he swears he hasn't been on any of those 'types' of sites.

Thanks for all your help, I'm off to try and delete some more unknown files.
BTW... I don't rate MacKeeper at all, complete waste of money. :p

----------

On another note I cannot believe I've got over 150GB worth of photo's :eek:
Thanks Nikkon! I have the J1 and for every photo I take it takes 5, I'll have to get into the habit of deleting on import. :cool:
 
I SO wish Apple could get it's crap together and solve this little problem. It seems to me that about 2% of the posts here have to do with "other." Would it be so hard to buy and/or incorporate one of the nice utilities that do a better job of identifying what you have stored on your drive??
 
So I've spent the last two hours moving all my stuff over to an external hard drive.

The only thing left is is a file called
.DS_Store

I've deleted it over 20 times and it keeps reappearing :confused:

Bug?
 
.DS_Store is a file created by Mac OS X that stores the window layout. If deleted it is remade. It's best to ignore it.
 
See that's how hopeless I am!

I've now managed to get 225GB available. If it wasn't for my iWeb pages I'd be deleting the whole drive and starting again.

Anyone know how I can locate my files for my site on iWeb and move them to my external drive? :confused:

My fella's defo getting the cold shoulder from me tonight :p
 
Anyone know what all these kernel buffer messages are all about? Normal or are they the problem?
 

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SORTED!!! Finally thanks so much

Thank's so much for all your help, OMNIDISK sorted the problem in the end :)
 

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If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion storage tab is about, this may help explain:
For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:
Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:
 
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