Hard disk drive mysteriously loosing space...????

[sam10685]

The other day I was doing some clean up on my computer to free up more space. I think i was down to 5 gigs of space left. I deleted a load of un-necessary pictures, songs and files. I think I was up to 9.5 free gigs so i felt like I had won the lottery. Then, I went to the Disk Repair utility and decided to Zero-out Deleted files to see if that would free up any more space. I did that then restarted and all of the sudden I only had 40 megabytes free. I started swearing in my head like Elaine does on The Subway episode of Seinfeld. Then this morning I got up and re-started my laptop and it had jumped down to 19 megs free space. I don't get it. Is it possible some guy could have hi-jacked my drive and is putting stupid stuff on it? What can I do?

 

[matperk]

download and run disk inventory x (before you run out of space that is!) and see what you can dig up by looking a visual representation of the space used on your hard drive.

 

[Eidorian]

Do you get the drive space back after rebooting?

 

[TEG]

Virtual Memory takes up space, as does the Cache from your browser.

But to have 5GB taken up that quickly, it sounds like some sort of auto download.

TEG

 

[sam10685]

Do you get the drive space back after rebooting?

I seem to loose space when I reboot. Makes absolutely no sense to me.

Virtual Memory takes up space, as does the Cache from your browser.

But to have 5GB taken up that quickly, it sounds like some sort of auto download.

TEG

How would I find out if it is and stop an auto download if it is that?

 

[Gymnut]

Possibly you have a crash log that's taking up that missing hard drive space. May want to check the Log folder in your Library to see if a funky log is the culprit. I've had one eat up some 30GB of space once.

 

[sam10685]

download and run disk inventory x (before you run out of space that is!) and see what you can dig up by looking a visual representation of the space used on your hard drive.

You are a genius! I did that and it turns out i had a 9 gig "recovered files" folder in my trash that I didn't know about and thought was deleted. i now have 9.5 gigs of free space.