Hard drive is continuously filling up

[Flyers108]

I have a MacBook [Aluminum], 2.4 GHz processor, 4GB RAM, & I'm running OS 10.6.7.

Issue: My hard drive is continuously filling itself up from somewhere or something. I'm not sure where it is coming from or how to stop it. Other threads I have read have indicated info on ASL taking up considerable CPU space, but that is not the case here. Other threads have also instructed to take a look at which logs are running and other such operations, but I'll be honest in saying that I really have no idea what that means. I have Console, Activity Monitor, & Terminal all open from trying the instructions from other threads yet nothing has been working. Many of the people suffering from the problem state that they can restart their machine and then the proper amount of disk space will appear again. This does not hold true for my situation. Some folder named "private" has also frequently been the culprit, but I can't find a "folder" with this name. I have found something titled "/private/var/log" in the left section of Console, however. Important to mention: these threads have been from a year or two and several versions of OS X ago.

The overall problem being that I laptop seems to burn through a few GB every few hours or in a day. The other day I cleared about 23 GB of videos from my hard drive, and within a day all that space was taken up. Two days ago, I deleted 16 GB of duplicate iTunes songs and similar small files and yesterday that space was all taken up again. Today, I have been trying to find out what the issue is. I tried downloading a new album, but I apparently do not have sufficient disk space to do so.

Again, when it comes to these logs and similar Terminal entries, I am completely ignorant. I have no idea what they mean or indicate. If you could walk me through any Terminal or Console based instructions, then I would be very appreciative. It would also be most helpful for me to not have to follow up your comment with questions based on my ignorance of the processes lol.

EDIT: After posting this thread, I looked at Console once more. I have noticed that this shows up every 30 seconds:
3/27/11 2:33:52 PM com.apple.dynamic_pager[43] dynamic_pager: Need more space on the disk to enable swapping.
3/27/11 2:34:22 PM com.apple.dynamic_pager[43] dynamic_pager: Need more space on the disk to enable swapping.
Not sure what it means, but I hope it helps in solving the issue.

 

[GGJstudios]

Install Disk Inventory X or Grand Perspective to see how space is being used.

 

[Flyers108]

Install Disk Inventory X or Grand Perspective to see how space is being used.

I am downloading Disk Inventory X now. I will edit this post with further information upon completion and analysis of the program.

Thank you for your help.

EDIT: After downloading, installing, & running Disk Inventory X, I have discovered that I have many, many .emlx files from the Mail application that are put in Mail --> Mailboxes --> Recovered Messages --> Messages. This is taking up a grand 95.8 GB of space. I assume that I can simply delete these because they seem to be meaningless files, but I will refrain from doing so until I receive further instruction. There are 1,787 total, and, oddly enough, 932 of them have been created since yesterday at 2:32 a.m. After scrolling through all of the files, most of them are made in a one to two day period and then it stops for a significant amount of time. The past two days have significantly more files than any other set. The files date back to September 22. 2010 at 8:42 p.m. Is it safe to delete these files? Is there a way to stop Mail from creating these monstrous files? I also find it odd that I no longer use Mail anymore. I have resorted to just using GMail and my university's actual web pages rather than the Mail application.