Private Folder using up 45GB of space

[jynx21]

Hi all

I need some help - i realised i a big chunk of my hard drive space missing and couldn't find where it had gone. I downloaded Disk Inventory and ran the program. It shows that i have a folder called 'Private' within this are three sub folders:

Var
Log
Asl

I have searched for all of these and can't find them on my hard drive anywhere. Can anyone tell me what these are, if i can delete them and if so how do i find them.

Many Thanks in advance

 

[RaceTripper]

The private folder is in the root directory but is hidden. You can access it from the Terminal program. Type 'cd /' and then type 'cd ls' (w/out the single quotes) and you'll see. You'll most likely need to use the sudo command to do anything within /private.

If none of this makes sense, then I suggest not mucking around as unix gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself without warning if you don't know what you are doing.

Otherwise, you can use a tool like Cocktail to run the periodic maintenance scripts. That will clean up tmp, logs, and so on so that you get space back again.

One other thing: most of the space used in /private is probably swap (virtual memory) and/or a sleep image file.

 

[jynx21]

Thanks for the advice - havemanaged to clear about 30 GB - will run cocktail now.

🙂

 

[Tumbleweed666]

One other thing: most of the space used in /private is probably swap (virtual memory) and/or a sleep image file.

Surely 45GB is outrageous for a sleep image or swap file? I wouldn't have thought either would be more than the size of memory, likely 4GB?

 

[RaceTripper]

Surely 45GB is outrageous for a sleep image or swap file? I wouldn't have thought either would be more than the size of memory, likely 4GB?

The sleepimage will be the size of installed RAM. 8 GB on my system, but that's probably the largest file. Swap files could get pretty large. On my system.

-rw------T 1 root wheel 8589934592 Feb 12 09:34 sleepimage
-rw------- 1 root wheel 67108864 Feb 19 12:49 swapfile0
-rw------- 1 root wheel 67108864 Feb 19 18:51 swapfile1
-rw------- 1 root wheel 134217728 Feb 19 18:51 swapfile2


Actually, they aren't really in /private, but in /var/vm. /private has a symbolic link to /var.