My HD Capacity goes down with every move!!!?!?

[l7alzk]

Ok so my question is this one, I have a Mac Book Pro 2.4 Ghz and 160 GB HD. I'ved been trying to clean my Mac erasing stuff i dont need and just placing everything on my external HD to keep my space up in my mac. So the thing is I have noticed that i keep erasing stuff but space keeps going down, then I noticed that everytime I opened something or did anything on the mac the space on HD goes down with every move. Even when I open documents or just pop open Garageband or Itunes, with every move the space goes down.

I am sorry but I am a bit new at this ived had this Mac for about 4 months now and i am still learning...

Is there any way I can get that space back? I thought it was the "cache" but I honestly don't know.

Please can any one be so kind to explain why this happends and how can I get my HD space back!!!
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Thanks in advance!!! ^_^ !!

 

[l7alzk]

Update...

I suspect this problem might be caused by the timemachine program....

When I connect my External HD to the Mac it starts to suck space from the internal HD.... How the hell can I fix this!!!

Please anyone help me out i am going crazy with this....

 

[179202]

Update...

I suspect this problem might be caused by the timemachine program....

When I connect my External HD to the Mac it starts to suck space from the internal HD.... How the hell can I fix this!!!

Please anyone help me out i am going crazy with this....

Right now, you need to give us more information on this problem so that we can help you out. I can't see why it would be time machine, but if it is, you can just change the directory that time machine backs up to using the system preferences panel. It is definitely not the machine though as, by default, time machine is essentially 'off' until you plug in an external HD (in this event, it would ask if you want to use the external HD for backing up).

So, things to do:
1) Go to 'Time Machine' in system preferences (with your external HD plugged in) and check that the external HD is selected.
2) Give us more information. It's tedious to write out, but it means we can actually help you as opposed to being completely bewildered.

 

[kolax]

Sounds like virtual memory. How much space is it going down by and how much are you running at once?

They say you should have 10% of your hard drive free..

 

[DukeofAnkh]

How much is your free space going down by? If it's only a few meg, I wouldn't worry about it since it's quite possibly virtual memory, like someone already said. If it's gigabytes, then I'd start to worry.

Does this missing memory come down when you reboot?

They say you should have 10% of your hard drive free..

A bit of a tangent, but I just want to say that OS X doesn't freak out if you use up all your space (yes, learnt this the hard way). XP, on the other hand, has a hissy fit and makes it very tedious for you to actually fix the problem by deleting stuff (on my old computer, this is, anyway).

 

[Willis]

What 'stuff you don't need' are you putting onto your external?

If you could give us some more details that would help

 

[kolax]

A bit of a tangent, but I just want to say that OS X doesn't freak out if you use up all your space (yes, learnt this the hard way). XP, on the other hand, has a hissy fit and makes it very tedious for you to actually fix the problem by deleting stuff (on my old computer, this is, anyway).

It doesn't have a hissy fit, but it does slow down and can be come sluggish.

If you have less than 10GB's free, then you'd probably notice this. I certainly did.

 

[l7alzk]

Well the time machine says "last Update Failed" , I was reading and I think it is because the external HD is not formatted to "extended journaled" so it is not using my external HD to store up the back up data on it, it is actually storing it on my internal HD.

The HD space goes does with every move, for example my HD had 70 gb's free from me erasing stuff and storing them on my 500GB external HD, and with every move I made, I sudenly activated spaces and it went down .30Mb, then I oppened Firefox and another .20MB goes down. I kept noticing it was going down so I started to try and figure out what was going on. All of a sudden from 70G that I had in like 20 mins I had 57GB left!! What the hell is that?! When I saw this I freaked out so disconnected my external HD and it stopped It wasnt draining my HD space....

The time machine says that it cannot use my external HD for storing back up because it is not formatted to do so and it just cant, so i just click ok, and w/e like i don't care if it doesnt.

I went to my Time machine preferences and it said "ON" on the slide thing and it had the "check" on the back up while battery on power. (Says this on the option botton in time machine preferences) Also there where that big blank part where you put the data you dont want time machine to store, says on bottom says "Total Included 91.1 GB" . I was thinking this was all the stored data from the back up... maybe its using my own HD to back up everything. (All this while the External HD is not conected)

What kind of stuff? Well Anime series I dlow, programs, .dmg files i store for whenever i neede, pics, and alot more stuff so i can keep my internal memory clean and ready to use (Which is one of the reasons why people buy external HD's)

Please Help me out I really must fix this because it is draining my space out everytime I connect my external HD... and I have almost 80gb's of data in my HD already so it would be hard to formatted now.... Unless it was totally and utterly necesary...

Thanks guys I really apreciate your help and sorry for not giving enough info in my initial post... hope this all works if need more i will reply as soon as posible!!!

-l7alzk-