Hard drive space disappearing, can't figure it out

[fishepa]

I have a mac mini with snow leopard and I'm having a really weird issue. My disk space starts at 44GB free and over a period of about 4 days will drop to zero and the whole computer will freeze up. I will have to manually restart the mini to reclaim the space and the same thing will happen over and over again. Can anyone help?

Thanks

 

[0dev]

Try repairing disk permissions and checking the disk itself. Both of these things can be done in Disk Utility.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

To find out, where you hard drive capacity is being used, you can use the following free applications:

• DiskInventory X
• OmniDiskSweeper
• JDisk Report
• GrandPerspective

Maybe try a combination of several, if you still can't find the "missing" capacity.

If you have Lion, maybe this applies:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating up my space? by theSeb​

 

[fishepa]

Try repairing disk permissions and checking the disk itself. Both of these things can be done in Disk Utility.

Thanks, I will try these out now.

 

[timotay89]

Do you use time machine?

If you do, it might be making small backups that are then put on the time machine drive when you plug it in.

If you use any program that uses versioning, and you use BIG files that are always changing (like large PDFs with Preview or iBooks Author) you might be losing space to those versions.

 

[0dev]

Do you use time machine?

If you do, it might be making small backups that are then put on the time machine drive when you plug it in.

No, Time Machine doesn't work like that.

 

[timotay89]

No, Time Machine doesn't work like that.

Yes it does. It stores local snapshots for up to a week, then deletes them. But they do take up some space on the hard drive until the time machine disk is plugged in.

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

 

[0dev]

Yes it does. It stores local snapshots for up to a week, then deletes them. But they do take up some space on the hard drive until the time machine disk is plugged in.

http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

I stand corrected! I'm still on SL so I've never come across that personally

 

[mikefla]

I have a mac mini with snow leopard and I'm having a really weird issue. My disk space starts at 44GB free and over a period of about 4 days will drop to zero and the whole computer will freeze up. I will have to manually restart the mini to reclaim the space and the same thing will happen over and over again. Can anyone help?

Thanks

Sounds like Time Machine/Time Machine Snapshot Backups. Turn off time machine if you don't use it at all and or turn off time machine backups. I had this issue back when I migrated from SL to Lion. Or if you use VMWARE Fusion it sounds like snapshot backups, turn them off if you don't want them.

-Mike