Hard Drive Automatically Filling Up

[thebeesknees]

OK, so here's my issue. For a long time my mac had around 10 GB of space left. Then, two nights ago, I got a notice that said my startup disk was full. I deleted some stuff, a bunch of movies that I didn't know existed, and I had 30 GB of space yesterday. But now, this morning, there is only 10 MB of space left! I think it may have something to do with a file called hfamily1.dmg, which took up 10 GB of space and I couldn't delete it, but I just left it there. But even that wouldn't take up all that room! I've always been connected to the internet, and I've always had an external drive plugged in. I'm running DiskInventoryX right now, but if this problem keeps happening...

Thanks

 

[kolax]

OS X uses Virtual Memory - when there isn't enough memory available in RAM, it will start using the hard drive.

It is recommended that you leave at least 10GB of your hard drive free, otherwise you'll probably notice slowdowns when you don't have enough available RAM.

What type of Mac are you using?

And regarding the .dmg file you couldn't delete, it definitely wasn't mounted when you tried?

 

[thebeesknees]

Bah, I realized what happened. I had several USB drives connected, and it tried to create backups of those drives on my internal drive...

Anyone know why?

 

[kolax]

Are you using Time Machine, and if so what hard drive as you using as the Backup?

 

[thebeesknees]

Nah, I'm running 10.4.11. I was using an Iomega drive to store non-neccessary files (silly photo booths, stuff like that) and a big firewire drive as a backup.

 

[Rachreal]

Wait

I am having the same exact problem, my harddrive filled up completely and so i deleted a buch of stuff and and moved a whole bunch more onto an external hard drive and the next day its all full again!... i havnt been able to save anything new on here for like a week, and it also will not let me copy and paste anymore!.... all i have left is like 3 writing files and my applications n such... someone pleeeease help me
im on a macbook

also when i go to "get info" on everything it does not add up to my max capacity, the way it adds up i should have like 30 gb left