went to shower and lost 200gb

[Adros]

Woke up this morning, turned on my computer and checked my e-mail and then went off to shower. Came back to a message that said your start-up disk is close to being full, which was news to me since I thought I had over 200gb still free. I checked and it said I had zero KB available... Went into time machine to check my last back-up from the night before, and it said I had last night I had over 200gb free...

Little about my computer:
2009 Mac Pro running 10.5.8
4 Internal Drives: 2 300gb WD velociraptors (one for OS X boot and one is my windows drive) and then 2 1tb WD black drives for storage. The OS X boot drive has an external for time machine, while each 1tb has its own external with ccc doing backups.



Now my first question is does anyone have any idea what could have caused this, or is there some information they think might help me find what did it? My first instinct was to go to the root of my boot drive and look for huge files. After not finding any I turned on hidden files and checked those as well, again nada. I am really mystified as to WHERE the space went... even if I don't find out what caused it I'd still take any ideas on finding the memory sink.

Second question is should a clean install and time machine restore fix it? I am guessing I would get back the space, but unless I can figure out what caused it do you guys think it is worth it?

Last question is a little off topic, but since I may be doing a clean install anyways should I just go ahead and upgrade to snow leapord? I have my home folder on one of the 1tb drives, would there be any issue to using a "leapord home folder" with snow leapord? I know I'd lose my apps, but I was thinking about doing a clean install anyways.

Thanks for any ideas on this guys, really has me mystified.

 

[kevink2]

I would suggest looking at either the log files, maybe some service went crazy, or check virtual memory (swap).

 

[Adros]

I tried looking at the logs, but I just kept getting spammed by messages that I believe had to do with me being out of memory more than what caused them. I did a restore from my last time machine back-up just now, and everything seems fine for the moment. See if that keeps up... I was very impressed that Time Machine didn't have any trouble even though my home folder was on a separate hard drive than the one restored... Even my firefox started up on the right pages.

So far still got all my space...

 

[Tesselator]

Last question is a little off topic, but since I may be doing a clean install anyways should I just go ahead and upgrade to snow leapord? I have my home folder on one of the 1tb drives, would there be any issue to using a "leapord home folder" with snow leapord? I know I'd lose my apps, but I was thinking about doing a clean install anyways.

I have no idea (or too many ideas) of what caused this but I can answer this last question.

HELL YES! SNOW LEOPARD ROCKS!!!

Seriously, OMFG! It's awesome! I love it, love it, love it! Everything I wanted or thought that Vista did a little better than OS X has been addressed. Everything is faster (though this revision of Safari is not the speediest - yet) and slicker! But slick in very useful ways! I can't recommend upgrading to SL strongly enough - it's just night and day!

And If I were you I would format the troubled drive, restore from TM, test the installation for 10 or 20 min. and then insert and upgrade from the SL DVD. All of your Users folder will be preserved, all of your application setting will remain in tact and even your icon positions and wallpaper is retained. The restore will probably take you 2 hours or so and the SL installation takes about 45 minutes.

PS: when you format your drive do the erase free space just after to make sure the drive is good. If you have smcFanControl use that while checking, restoring, and installing so as not to over heat anything.

Good luck!

PS: PS: you can turn off the Drive Full messages in the System Preferences.

 

[Adros]

Out of curiosity, how does delete free space help verify a drive is good?

 

[Tesselator]

Out of curiosity, how does delete free space help verify a drive is good?

Because it writes to every sector of the volume (a user specified number of times). Any sector errors that are likely to occur will get picked up in the sweep and relocated or marked as bad. Standard format (erase) does nothing but rewrite the partition blocks - AFAIK.





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