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Hard drive free space shrinking and expanding..

sansimage

sansimage

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 15, 2010
9
0
Califonya
Ok a weird thing is occurring with my startup disk. I was reading something on Chrome and suddenly a popup said my disk space is getting low. I thought that was weird, and in Finder it was down to 790 MB. Last I checked I thought I had about 30 GB. Then when I looked again it was down to 789 and still shrinking.

I closed Chrome, iTunes and a couple applications, and soon the free space started going back up. Now it aseems to have stopped at 13.23 GB. I know some applications use virtual memory or temporary memory, but 13 gigs? whats going on?
 
A sleep image will take a snapshot of your memory and store it on disk and update it periodically. The size of the sleep file can approach the amount of RAM you have. If Time Machine is enabled it will take "snapshots" of your system files and keep them on the drive until a backup is performed. Time Machine snapshots aren't supposed to occur if you're running low on memory.

The best thing to do is find out what you don't need and either off load it to another drive or delete it. Memory snapshots can be prevented as described below:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-to-disable-os-x-from-creating-sleep-image.1685252/

Good luck.
 
Well thank you macrobert and satcomer. I'll have to experiment with those settings because i like to keep as much browsing history as possible, if only there was a backup browsing data app.
 
That's a good point. I'm going to do some searching on using different disks for different time machine backups, so i can have just one that's for the boot drives and one that's for my bulk drives. Thanks!

By the way, if anyone needs help finding where all their free space went, Disk Inventory X is a great tool to find out who the culprits are and fast. Just realized where 10 GB went in 5 seconds - I never deleted the Yosemite & El Capitan installer dmg's from the Applications folder after making my boot stick-drive. ;)

It can be downloaded for free here: http://www.derlien.com/downloads/index.html
 
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