Filled up Hard Drive Issue

[chtirrell]

Yesterday, I returned from lunch to a message on my MacBook Pro that my start-up disk was full. The previous day, I noted that I had approximately 15 gigs left on my laptop, however after this message I had less than 100 megs. I purged approximately 2.5 gigs of media from my hard drive right away to free up some space. After this deletion, I noted that my HD was still filling at a rate of ~10 megs/s. Before I knew it, my hard drive was getting filled again.

I immediately turned my airport connection off and had no wired connection. This did not stem the tide, so it doesn't seem to be an internet related fill. I then began to shut down applications and check to see if this stopped the fill. All the applications I shut down (mail, iCal, Audium, Excel, Pages, Colloquy, etc.) had no affect until I shut down SuperDuper!. SuperDuper was currently backing up and once I killed the app, the fill seemed to stop with 220 megs left.

After this I searched my HD for any big storage sinks using WhatSize, but I couldn't find anything that accounted for 15 gigs in any one place. I have since purged some unnecessary music duplicates from iTunes (which I knew to exist previously) and used xSlimmer to clean house a bit. I have gotten 12 gigs back, but I do not believe that this is related to the 15 gigs that disappeared. I have since rerun SuperDuper! and the problem has not resurfaced.

Here are my laptop stats:
2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
120 Gig HD
500 Gig External (running SuperDuper! and Time Machine as backup)
Mac OS X 10.5.5
All system updates are current

At this point, I'm out of ideas for what could have caused this and where the extra space went to. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Charles

 

[belvdr]

From Terminal, to check each folder's disk space:

cd /
du -sk * | sort -n

Listed in KB, the folders using the most space will be at the bottom. At first guess, I always check /tmp.

 

[chtirrell]

Hi belvdr,

Thanks for the tip, but this command does something very similar WhatSize that shows the amount of disk usage based on directories. I wasn't able to find any specific directory that used a lot of space. Whatever was occurring probably was filling into several different directories.

Best,



Charles

 

[eman]

Have you used your restore disks to run repair disk and permissions? Worth a try.

 

[belvdr]

Hi belvdr,

Thanks for the tip, but this command does something very similar WhatSize that shows the amount of disk usage based on directories. I wasn't able to find any specific directory that used a lot of space. Whatever was occurring probably was filling into several different directories.

Best,



Charles

I'm not familiar with that app, but if that app is not showing you directories like /var, /usr, or /tmp, then you're missing information.

 

[chtirrell]

I'm not familiar with that app, but if that app is not showing you directories like /var, /usr, or /tmp, then you're missing information.

Hi belvdr,

Thanks for the replay. Those directories are shown with this app.


Hi eman,

I haven't tried that yet, but I'll look into it. Thanks!

Best,



Charles