Disk Space Jumping From 20 - 10 Gigs After 1 hour of use

[loon3y]

when i turn on or reset my macbook i have 20 GB of disk space,


after i use it for some time (browsing, not downloading or installing anything) it drops from 20 to 15 GB of disk space, than i start using parallels desktop (windows is boot camped so the hard disk is partitioned already) it goes from 15 to 10 GB

what is this? is this a virus? because it seem like it, i've never encountered this before. on a Mac

 

[EricT43]

Does this happen after the lid is closed, or after the computer goes to sleep?

I'm not an expert on this, but I think that both OSX and Windows have sleep-state or hibernation files that are 5-10 GB in size. They allow the computer to wake up more quickly after they go to sleep.

 

[Xcallibur]

when i turn on or reset my macbook i have 20 GB of disk space,


after i use it for some time (browsing, not downloading or installing anything) it drops from 20 to 15 GB of disk space, than i start using parallels desktop (windows is boot camped so the hard disk is partitioned already) it goes from 15 to 10 GB

what is this? is this a virus? because it seem like it, i've never encountered this before. on a Mac

It sounds like your HDD is caching data which was cached in RAM, nothing to worry about, it will fluctuate. You can see how much data has been cached in the 'VM' size label under the 'System Memory' tab in the Activity Monitor app.