HD filling up - why? (is Photoshop the culprit?)

[nagromme]

My OS X boot drive (Panther) went from 1.2 GB free down to 750 and now just 500 MB. I've only created <100 MB of new data recently.

I checked my Logs, Caches, App Support, and Prefs folders, but none of them had grown really large. I checked those folders for my user account AND my root Library AND System/Library. Biggest was System/Library/Caches at 150 MB--the other folders showed 20 MB or less in Get Info.

I searched Everywhere for invisible files >100 MB and found none. (But that search wouldn't catch masses of SMALL files.) Now I've run disk repair just in case, and rebooted (which sometimes frees up a little space). Didn't help.

My only lead: Photoshop did crash on me once recently. I made sure to Purge it at next launch, in the hopes that it might clean up some leftover scratch data. But I don't really know where it stores its scratch data--where should I look?

I'm running low and can't seem to find the space-hogging culprit!

Thanks for any ideas.

 

[brap]

Terminal will help you out here; entering:

du -h -d 1

...will give you the size of each item, files and folders, in your current location in -human readable form. If you want to go deeper, increase the -depth switch, but I suggest going one level deep and cd'in to the offending directory to save time.

If you're really puzzled, and things seem to be going pearshaped - sudo the command in the root of your drive to see if OS X is hiding anything from you.

Finally - have you used Delocalizer?

 

[yellow]

If you're Terminal-shy.. try OniDiskSweeper

 

[Mechcozmo]

Run your cron scripts and see if they clear out any files, maybe?

Cocktail, MacJanitor, Onyx, and a million others will do it for you. Cleaning up those files might do it...

 

[nagromme]

Thanks for the tips--they'd help me do my searches for invisible stuff better next time. And I'll pursue the cron thing as well.

Amzingly, my HD apparently contains NO invisible files bigger than 30 MB except my VM swapfile. (Though I did turn up a few 5-15 MB BAH leftovers from zips.)

Cleanup aside... I'm wondering what kinds of things might CAUSE this kind of HD fill-up? Especially all of a sudden?

Anyone know where I should look for hidden Photoshop scratch files?

 

[iSaint]

All those scripts and commands are above me...but have you done any major imports of photos? ...or music? Do you have an iPod?

 

[nagromme]

I have an iPod. Some of this HD space loss could have been around the time of my last iPod connection I suppose, but most of it has happened since then. I haven't connected the iPod in several days.

No photo imports, but I bought about 3 songs on iTunes.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Anyone know where I should look for hidden Photoshop scratch files?

Usually at root level of the drive.

Check your Pshop preferences, under Plug-ins & Scratch Disks.

There's no ability with Pshop to specify a particular folder for scratch files, just which drive to use.

 

[nagromme]

Hmmm... then Photoshop doesn't seem to have left anything there. (I launch Carbon Copy Cloner for a quick glance at root.)

 

[jackieonasses]

It is your boot drive right??

Well that is it. OSX takes up space and gives up space. You notice it (the counter shows it) when you are under 8 or so gigs. The system gets *really* screwey once you get under 2 gigs. I bet a euro that if you restart you will get that space back. It is being burned by virtual memory somehow. Try restarting and seeing if that will go away.

The real question is - How big is your hard drive?? If you don't have anything over 30megs, then you must have a-lot of small files!

kyle

 

[kettle]

This is good freeware for visualizing your drive contents...
VolSpace

 

[nagromme]

Thanks for explaining the space fluctuation I've always noticed--and I've always noticed that restarting does help free up some of that. I've been down to 200 MB free at times!

In this case, restarting hasn't helped--and instead of fluctuation, it's been a steady plummet.

The cron scripts did help some though--I guess I'll watch and see and hope to learn about more possible causes.

(It's not that I have no files bigger than 30, just no invisible files bigger than that... except a 64 MB swapfile. 80 GB HD and 1 GB RAM.)

Thanks for the VolSpace link.

Here's another: nice freeware for all kinds of system maintenance in one simple place--including running cron scripts, fixing permissions, dumping browser caches, etc. Just check the boxes for the tasks you want, and they all get done in one step: Yasu.

 

[cyclotron451]

Nobody's yet mentioned what happens when free space =0

It's always been considered good management to have about 10% of a Hard-disk's size left free. i.e. an (approx) 80GB disk should be filled up to a max of about 72GB.(=8GB free for 'overhead') Of course I haven't always followed this advice and then one day drifted up to a few hundreds of megabytes free, which at one stage became Zero megabytes free, then everything crashed. I lost Mail.app , Safari bookmarks and just days trying to get everything to work again. I suppose it was related to the preferences being open , then being unable to save to disk at some point , and this had the effect of resetting many apps to zero. Don't do it!!!
I now consider getting below 5% disk capacity an OS X EMERGENCY ISSUE and so run <http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/> "Whatsize" (donationware) regularly e.g. dumping yesterday the 900Megs of Epson printer drivers that I don't use. Also there's a useful webpage summary about cleaning OS X and shifting the big-Data off to other disks at <http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html> "X-Labs"

 

[nagromme]

OS X has it's built-in low-disk warning message, and I heed it! You can tell it not to appear, but I let it. And rarely see it, luckily. And I'd prefer to have MUCH more cushion... but sometimes things pile up I've got lots of old projects I need to archive and then delete.

But now that you mention it, I did hit 0 MB once too! I didn't lose anything or even have to reboot, though, I just had to trash some stuff before I could save what I was working on. I think I got off easy compared to you!

 

[iSaint]

I have an iPod. Some of this HD space loss could have been around the time of my last iPod connection I suppose, but most of it has happened since then. I haven't connected the iPod in several days.

No photo imports, but I bought about 3 songs on iTunes.

I have a 40 gig HD on my iBook, and 12.90 gig is the 2,887 songs I have in iTunes. It looks like my 1,474 pictures are only 791 mb, so that's no big deal. I wish I had an external drive for my iTunes considering how low I'm getting on HD space.

Again, all these scripts and other recommendations you're getting from others is above my head, but it would seem something simple like the actual programs your have installed on your computer. Music takes up a lot as I stated above.

 

[neut]

i try not to get under 10GB free. It's a good idea not to let the HD get under a Gig or 2. Things get really screwy ...

2 albums ripped with AAC at 128kbs will push you over 100MB.


peace | neut