iMac Hard Drive File Size problems

[spud69]

This is my first post but i cant find an answer to this problem. I have the 21.5" late 2009 Mac with OS X installed, during the last few weeks drive space has been reduced to nothing even though the hard drive is kept tidy and unused files deleted and trash box emptied. When i've looked further into it my own user folder shows 250Gb but all the sub folders only add upto about 70Gb so there is 180Gb discrepancy somewhere in this directory but just cant find where it is to remove it. I've attached a screenshot to make it clearer.





THANKS in advance.....Andrew

 

[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.

Do you have FileVault enabled?

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

 

[RedCroissant]

HDD space

Hello,

I don't which version of OS X you're running, but I had a similar problem with my 2009 20"iMac and it turned out that my HDD was failing. Luckily I was under AppleCare and they sent someone out to my house to replace it for me.

Another possibility is that the different versions of OS X recognized the HDD space differently. When I was running Leopard, my 320 GB HDD wasn't fully recognized, but once I reinstalled Snow Leopard, the full amount was recognized and that might also be an issue.

My advice would be to call AppleCare if you still have it and see what they can figure out.

 

[marzer]

Have you ran disk utility? To check for any catalog/linking issues?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Hello,

I don't which version of OS X you're running,

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, apparent due to the small traffic lights and the Launchpad and Mission Control Dock icons.

Another possibility is that the different versions of OS X recognized the HDD space differently. When I was running Leopard, my 320 GB HDD wasn't fully recognized, but once I reinstalled Snow Leopard, the full amount was recognized and that might also be an issue.

Your HDD capacity was recognised fully in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard just uses a different reporting system, which is not binary, but decimal.
A 320 GB HDD has approximately 320,000,000,000 Bytes, in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and earlier (and in Windows and other OSs), the factor 1024 is used to go from Bytes to KiloBytes to MegaBytes to GigaBytes, thus
320,000,000,000 ÷ 1024 ÷ 1024 ÷ 1024 = 298 GB.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and later use the decimal system, thus they use 1000 as factor to get from Bytes to KiloBytes and so on.

 

[yukio]

is that a 1TB drive by any chance?

if i recall, Time Machine uses your drive for local shadow copies when you are away from your Time Capsule and as a fallback in case the other backups were to fail.

here's what my drive looks like via About This Mac-->More Info..-->Storage

But if you look at the free space displayed, it's almost the sum of the backup space and the true free space.

 

[spud69]

Thanks for the replies - Disk Inventory X was a good help thanks and helped me get to the root of the problem. Turned out to be from a hidden directory within users called Library where all the e-mails are stored. There turned out to be a recurring e-mail which was bounced back by GMail and kept recurring hundreds of times over in recovered mails. Was a pain to stop it happening but is apparently an old problem between Mail and GMail when if you send oversized emails which get bounced back.

Thanks Again........Andrew