Imac Hard Drive should not be full

[buckles31]

I have a 24 inch 2009 Imac with a 320 Gb hard drive and 2 Gb of RAM. I recently performed a clean install of Snow leopard and am now using version 10.6.8.
Here is my problem: I am apparently using 299 GB of space on my hard drive. This is impossible. I, along with Omnidisk and DiskInventoryX calculated around 54 GB of usage. I have 7 albums of music on Itunes. I have about 1000 pictures on iphoto from my iphone. That's it.

My User file contains around 11 GB.
Application file- 10 GB
Library- 6 GB
System - 5 GB
Music - 3 GB
It then descends from 400 MB down to 40 kb's. Where are the other 250+ GB coming from?? A friend of mine with the same Imac packed with music, photos, photoshop, etc is only at 130 GB of used storage. Something is not right...
I can say that recently I performed a time machine back up of my hard drive onto an external one. I then performed a clean install of Snow Leopard on my Imac. After having trouble figuring out how to pick and choose what I wanted to place back on, I used migration assistant to restore all of my files. (I know this defeats the purpose of a clean install but I'm not tech savy and I was worried I wouldn't be able to retrieve all of my information). I wonder if this has something to do with my current situation. Either way, I feel that my hard drive should be practially unused for the amount of files I have.
I appreciate any advice you can give me. Thanks in advance.

 

[cyclotron451]

I've used "WhatSize" app, $13 - can try before buying to map/understand the HDD. I've also used Invisibles in order to get Finder to show all the ".DS" and many other hidden system files than can sometimes be too large It's free & in German - but just d/l the Zip

If you have Google Chrome, they have had issues with repeatedly storing gigabytes of the old data every time that the browser is updated, maybe a cleaning program like Onyx can help Free - just get the right version for your OS

You can have old system folders, old swap files - many surprises in your system waiting to be understood! One time when the drive gets deliberately full is if you choose 'erase Free Space' in Disk Utility - this then creates a single file which is the size of all your empty HDD, fills it to overwrite sensitive stuff on your disk. This gives you teh HDD is full warning but it is temporary. A full Mac HDD is not a good idea!

 

[Fishrrman]

Something -- perhaps an invisible file, a "prefs file gone crazy", something -- is eating up that space.

Try "Grand Perspective" to get a better idea as to what is eating up that disk space:
http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

 

[buckles31]

Thanks for the help. I found the culprit! It was a file I could only access on my time machine back up. 157 GB folder of an ipod clone I made years ago when I was trying to save a broken ipod. It was locked on my Snow Leopard account until I allowed access to it.

 

[comatory]

Thanks for the help. I found the culprit! It was a file I could only access on my time machine back up. 157 GB folder of an ipod clone I made years ago when I was trying to save a broken ipod. It was locked on my Snow Leopard account until I allowed access to it.

Thumbs up! Used to deal with this crap on PCs but OS X can sometimes hide large file from you as well. I use little app called Spacie to find various cache and temp files some software creates.

 

[OtherWhat]

Having the same problem. How did you find the file in Time Machine?

 

[buckles31]

Having the same problem. How did you find the file in Time Machine?

I realized the problem existed for awhile since my external was holding around 300 GB's. I went into a time machine backup file. I then clicked the Users folder and found all the information from my first backup. All the files were locked. I "right clicked" each one and got info. There is a Lock icon on the bottom right. I entered my password and then clicked the plus sign on the bottom left and gave myself control over all users. Then I could go in to any folder and delete what was necessary. Since I had used migration assistant, I didn't need to go into a time machine backup file to do this. The Users folder was on my current Hard drive. I tried 3 or 4 programs to search for files but I actually had better luck doing it on my own. I know how frustrating it can be. I hope this helps you.