My Mac Mini says it has a 56-or-so GB hard drive, and that about 54 GB of it is used up. If I try to use a program like JDiskReport or OmniDiskSweeper to find out what files are taking up so much space, they only find about 20 GB worth of files. I have only one partition on the hard drive. What else could be taking up so much space?
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HD full, cannot find where the space went
- Thread starter nazgul42
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This may sound silly... but have you emptied the trash?
Unless you empty the trash, the files still take up space
Woof, Woof - Dawg
Unless you empty the trash, the files still take up space
Woof, Woof - Dawg
Open a terminal window, and do a
du -h
That'll show you the disk space utilization in all of your directories.
du -h
That'll show you the disk space utilization in all of your directories.
I apparently didn't have the latest version. Mine didn't have that break down. Generally what you do is look for the large blocks in the visual area and down in the status bar it'll give you the path to that block. Then you can delete as need be.
Here's what the Grand Perspective help says about the miscellaneous.
Here's what the Grand Perspective help says about the miscellaneous.
I think I may be having the same problem with my wife's iMac (no such problem on my MBP, thankfully). The total drive space is 297 GB, the "size of scanned files" is 173 GB (which is what a manual count adds up to using Finder), and Free Space (44 GB) plus "Miscellaneous used space" (80 GB) rounds it out.
The maddening things is that I cannot figure out where this *#$%* 80 GB is hiding!
I have seen comments about running applications as "root" - being a former Windows guy, I've always assumed this just means having local admin rights - but apparently that is not the way it works on a Mac?
Can I (as a local Admin) not see some user's files on this machine? That might explain it, but my wife has ~80 GB in photo files on this machine in her iPhoto library, and I can see THOSE with Grand Perspective, no problem...
The maddening things is that I cannot figure out where this *#$%* 80 GB is hiding!
I have seen comments about running applications as "root" - being a former Windows guy, I've always assumed this just means having local admin rights - but apparently that is not the way it works on a Mac?
Can I (as a local Admin) not see some user's files on this machine? That might explain it, but my wife has ~80 GB in photo files on this machine in her iPhoto library, and I can see THOSE with Grand Perspective, no problem...
Try going into terminal, typing "cd .." which will bring you to /Users then type "sudo du -h -d 1" which should show you how much each user is using.
du = disk use
-h = human readable (converts sizes to megabytes and gigabytes)
-d 1 = go 1 directory deep, without this it spews out a LOT of stuff as it gives you each subfolder size as well.
Solved
OK, somehow I solved the problem.
I was using iPhoto Library Manager fro Fat Cat Software (a great program, BTW!) and had merged a couple of iPhoto libraries, saving the old ones just to be safe (I was merging iPhoto Libraries from my wife, my daughter, and myself, all with separate user accounts on the iMac).
Well, I went in and using iPhoto Library Manager merged ALL the remaining libraries, then deleted them from the iMac (actually moved them to an external drive just to be safe).
Somehow magically when I was done with this process, the Finder reported that I had regained my missing 100 GB of space, and the the mysterious "Miscellaneous used space" in Grand Perspective was now 0 GB.
The only other thing I did was move a ~65 GB iTunes library to an external drive manually in the Finder, just to make sure I had space for the iPhoto library merging. Once I was done, I moved the iTunes Music folder back
OK, somehow I solved the problem.
I was using iPhoto Library Manager fro Fat Cat Software (a great program, BTW!) and had merged a couple of iPhoto libraries, saving the old ones just to be safe (I was merging iPhoto Libraries from my wife, my daughter, and myself, all with separate user accounts on the iMac).
Well, I went in and using iPhoto Library Manager merged ALL the remaining libraries, then deleted them from the iMac (actually moved them to an external drive just to be safe).
Somehow magically when I was done with this process, the Finder reported that I had regained my missing 100 GB of space, and the the mysterious "Miscellaneous used space" in Grand Perspective was now 0 GB.
The only other thing I did was move a ~65 GB iTunes library to an external drive manually in the Finder, just to make sure I had space for the iPhoto library merging. Once I was done, I moved the iTunes Music folder back