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losing hard drive space..

unispherephoto

unispherephoto

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 11, 2004
50
0
for some reason, my hard drive appears to be filling up on its own. i have not loaded anything new onto the drive nor am i in the process of downloading anything, yet after i leave my system running for any significant amount of time i have less drive space than i had before. if i restart, i will usually regain the lost space. is this a virtual memory issue? is it because my drive is almost full? (> 1 gb left)

also, i am still almost 3 gb short of capacity (drive is journaled hfs+, 18.63 gb, but only 15.97 worth of files show up when folder sizes are added up)

i have run cocktail to clean all caches, etc..but that never gives me more than a couple hundred mbs.

any ideas?


-----------------------------
TiBook 500/512/x.3.7
 
It's the VM filling up. Something like Windows XP's "page file". It's the part of the hard drive that the OS is using for extra memory. The only way I know of to revive it is to reboot your computer. Don't worry about the space though, if you need more, the VM size should automatically decrease, giving you more space.
 
ok thanks. any way to get back this lost 3 gb though? i cant imagine VM takes that much (and it never comes back after restart either)
 
The swap files are in /var/vm. If you look in there, you'll be able to see how much space they're using, and whether they're the culprit.
 
unispherephoto said:
yeah i used monolingual..but that still leaves more than 2 gb unaccounted for...
Click to expand...

Have you tried restarting to clear out the swapfile?
 
unispherephoto said:
ok thanks. any way to get back this lost 3 gb though? i cant imagine VM takes that much (and it never comes back after restart either)
Click to expand...

Virtual Memory can take quite a lot of space.

And sometimes files don't add up correctly if a user isn't logged in, etc.
 
OSX is great at managing disk space. Don't worry about it too much. Unlike Windows, OSX won't litter your HD with temp files.
 
yeah ive never even had to think about it before..i just noticed this recently.

thanks for the info
 
IF you only have a few hundred MBs left on a 20GB HD, then you'll experience slowdons. Keep atleast 2GB free, or the HD performance will suffer!
 
unispherephoto said:
where is this var/vm?
is it invisible?
Click to expand...

Yes, it is invisible and controlled by the OS.

neilrobinson said:
VM in OSX seems huge to me - i have 1gig of ram and the swap file is 3.1gig thats with safari and mail open...

if you do get short on space it does tend to auto reduce.
Click to expand...

Yup. But the best thing to do is keep at least 2 GB free. Or, get a bigger hard drive...:D :rolleyes:
 
Maybe it's time to buy and external firewire HD to move uneeded files to. (pics, music, etc)
 
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