Hard drive space disappearing.

[Toushi]

Okay first off I have a iMac with a 160gb hd and recently upgraded to leopard.

So I am running out of space on my hard drive so I am deleting unneccesary files. I thought I solved my space issue and I see that I still have 30 gigs free. So I use whatsize and find that I only have 70 gigs of files on my hard drive. So I have like 40 gigs of space just gone. And this is after a fresh startup.

So any advice?

 

[D3LM3L]

I would recommend you downloaded Disk Inventory X at http://www.derlien.com/. It'll give you a graphical representation of what's taking up how much space on your Mac. There's a good chance there's a cache file out of control that you'll simply have to delete.

 

[krye]

I would recommend you downloaded Disk Inventory X at http://www.derlien.com/. It'll give you a graphical representation of what's taking up how much space on your Mac. There's a good chance there's a cache file out of control that you'll simply have to delete.

I 2nd the motion. Disk Inventory X is awesome.

 

[TheSpaz]

I third that motion: Disk Inventory X is the shizzle! http://www.derlien.com/ ... hehe.

 

[bankshot]

Both WhatSize and Disk Inventory X suffer from the same fatal flaw: they won't find any files that your user doesn't have permission to see. And thus the total found will always be less than what's really on the disk. In my case, a quick test of Disk Inventory X found that it completely missed about 10 GB of files.

The only way to fix this is to run it directly as the super user from Terminal:

sudo /Volumes/Disk\ Inventory\ X\ 1.0/Disk\ Inventory\ X.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk\ Inventory\ X

(all one line)

Only then will you get an accurate breakdown of disk usage. Of course, either of these apps could fix the problem by using Apple's provided APIs for obtaining super user access by asking for an administrator password. Until then, many unsuspecting users will be getting false data...

 

[yellow]

For this reason, I prefer OmniDiskSweeper.