40Gb of "other" data in two days?????? HELP

[jrobben]

My macbook pro has been acting up recently. It told me that I have no more space left on my start-up disk. Upon investigation I saw that I had filled my hard drive with 100 Gb of "other" data. (I only have around 20Gb of music, movies, photos, and apps.) This was yesterday. I then decided to fix the problem by removing the partition on my hard drive that bootcamp was using because I rarely used windows in the fist place. I figured that the new space would be sufficient, but today when I logged onto my computer it informed me that is was still low on start up space. It had gathered 40 more Gb of "other" data!! So now, I only have around 300Mb of space. What is going on!?!?! Performance isn't terrible. I mean it is slowing but not to a crawl. Problem is that I can't have more than one or two applications open at once. So I guess I will rephrase. Performance is pretty terrible.

As you might be able to tell I am not the most tech savvy guy. I don't really know much about all the details of my computer, but it is a standard macbook pro purchased in 2009. I am also not a heavy user of my computer. All I really use it for is searching the web, writing papers, and some other stuff. No major downloading or photo/ video editing.

Please help. I hope there is some easy way to make it all go away, because I just started a semester long travel abroad on an island. No local mac retailer here...

Oh yeah, now it is showing that 100% of my hard drive is full of "other" no music movies photos or apps.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide me.

 

[maflynn]

Download and use OmniDiskSweeper That will scan your drive and detail how the space is being consumed

 

[jrobben]

120 Gb of email destroyed!!!!

Thank you very much for the help.

 

[dusk007]

You can also use DaisyDisk. The trial is free and enough for the use. It creates a pie diagramm that shows you how much and where stuff is stored. Easy to understand and use.
Usually when a harddrive wills for no obvious reason it has to do with backups and shadow copies. Like timemachine on disk.

Find what really takes up so much space and somebody here will tell you what to do about it.