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os x is freaking huge...

abhishekit

abhishekit

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 6, 2003
1,297
0
akron , ohio
Since i had only 6 gb left of my mere 30 gb of hd space, i was looking where was all that going..as you can see in the picture, the folder 'private' takes 4 gb!!,infact there is a subfolder inside named 'var' which is 4 gb.. and if i add 1.1 gb of 'Library' ,1.4 gb of 'System' , it comes to 6.5 gb!! add to that 3.8 gb of applications, most of which came preinstalled...its 10.3 gb...dude..thats a lot..i should have got more hd.. :eek:
 

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I fit my install of OS X on a 5 GB partition. And I still have about 1 GB left over. That is without the localizations, but does include most of the Xcode install and the BSD subsystem.
 
Interesting... my "private" folder is 280MB. :) You might want to poke around in there and see what's eating all that space - I agree OS X is rather large, but it doesn't seem out of line in comparison to a Red Hat/Fedora install or WinXP.

Now my "Library" folder, on the other hand, is 3.6GB. All in all I've tied up 22GB for everything, including my personal files and tunes. BTW you probably know that "dev" isn't real (in terms of disk space anyway).

Here's the biggies on my system:

5.4G Applications
1014M Developer
3.6G Library
1.5G System
4.9G Tunes
5.5G Users
280M private
957M sw
649M usr
 
Well, I've only got a 9 GB drive and I'm showing 2.04 GB free after Panther with XWindows and iLife 2004. I was showing 3 GB free prior to loading them, having Jaguar and iLife installed plus a few other things.
 
Private = "Keep Out"

The /private/var directory includes, among other things, most of the system logs that are being created in the background. If you're not leaving your computer on and running until the wee hours of the morning, then there are likely to be temp files and log files that are never being cleared away.

The /private directory also includes a pile of things that would cause your OS installation to stop running. I'd strongly recommend not manually deleting anything, or moving anything, unless you understand what you're doing (not "Think you understand", but actually do understand the Unix core of your OS).

I'm looking around for a one-click utility that will trigger the standard maintenance scripts for you at whim. If you're running 10.3 and are comfortable with the command line, execute the following commands:

sudo /etc/daily
sudo /etc/weekly
sudo /etc/monthly

If you don't know how to use Terminal, hang out and wait for my response later (I'm at a client's studio right now) or check out something like the shareware application Cocktail.

If you download and run Cocktail, what I think you should try first to run those three maintenance scripts. Open Cocktail, go to the "System" toolbar item, and choose the "Scripts" tab. Keep "Choose cron script:" set to "All" and click the "Run" button.

Best,
Logicat
 
abhishekit said:
Since i had only 6 gb left of my mere 30 gb of hd space, i was looking where was all that going..as you can see in the picture, the folder 'private' takes 4 gb!!,infact there is a subfolder inside named 'var' which is 4 gb.. and if i add 1.1 gb of 'Library' ,1.4 gb of 'System' , it comes to 6.5 gb!! add to that 3.8 gb of applications, most of which came preinstalled...its 10.3 gb...dude..thats a lot..i should have got more hd.. :eek:
Click to expand...

The directory /private/var/vm holds your swap files for virtual memory paging. As more swap files are needed, more are created, and each successive file is larger. There are a few things you can do to modify the file sizes (search around these forums and the http://forums.macosxhints.com forums but be very very careful). But I would just leave them alone. If you want to wipe out the swap files (until the OS needs new ones) then either restart or quit absolutely everything you can and re-launch.
 
my /private folder is only 115MB so you should definetely look closer what's eating those gigabytes...

in terminal, type "du -ka" and you'll see how much space each directory consumes. maybe you'll find out the problem.
 
i have a directory 'automount' in /private/var which occupies 3 gb...can you guys check if it occupies that much on your system?
thanks
 
I've had a crash log somehow eat up almost 50GB of space. Not sure what the hell prompted it to swell up so large but it took some digging around to finally find what the hell was taking up so much HD space.
 
abhishekit said:
i have a directory 'automount' in /private/var which occupies 3 gb...can you guys check if it occupies that much on your system?
thanks
Click to expand...

I'm showing 102 bytes for automount. There are only directories inside of it, though--no files.
 
bousozoku said:
I'm showing 102 bytes for automount. There are only directories inside of it, though--no files.
Click to expand...
k..actually what it had done was, it had mounted my windows computer in /private/var/automount/network..so the files i had transferred to the windows computer, they were all mounted on my network..i dont know why it did that though.anyways..i deleted them..
anyone knows why this happened?
thanks
 
Well, that's a weird one; automount is supposed to contain directories corresponding to network volumes you've mounted (I think...), but I've never heard of those actually containing any files, and I can't imagine that they're supposed to under normal circumstances.

Unless you've installed some 3rd party networking utility or messed with your UNIX config files, it must've just been some weird glitch that did that.

Incidentally, as a rule of thumb, the private folder shouldn't be very big--a few megabytes at most. If it's not, there's probably something amiss, and it's worth looking into (though you should never just delete things at random from OSX's "hidden" directories, like /private.

It can get huge due to the crash logs (and other glitches mentioned), but at least the logs are supposed to be cleared out by the daily/weekly/monthly scripts, so running them manually can help alieviate most issues with big log files.
 
well i didnt delete the files at random...all the files were the ones i had transferred to the windows pc in last 30 days or so...and now its ok..
i also think, may have been a glitch.., or atleast i hope so..
 
JFreak said:
my /private folder is only 115MB so you should definetely look closer what's eating those gigabytes...

in terminal, type "du -ka" and you'll see how much space each directory consumes. maybe you'll find out the problem.
Click to expand...

Lol. Typed that into terminal two minutes ago and directories are still flying up my screen at the rate of knots.

AppleMatt
 
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