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Spontaneously Disappearing Memory

T

thezoostation

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 30, 2008
19
0
Last night I was sitting at my computer when I got a message saying that my hard drive was almost full. I normally keep about 10% of it empty, but sure enough it was down to less than a gig. At a loss, I started looking for processes or downloads but could find nothing. I deleted what temporary stuff I could to free up some room and eventually got up to about 12 gigs free, but this morning it's down to 7. I have no idea how I lost over 20 gigs of room when I wasn't downloading or making anything. I searched through the space the file folders were taking up and nothing immediately jumps out as being 20 gigs larger than it should be. Any ideas?
 
thezoostation said:
Last night I was sitting at my computer when I got a message saying that my hard drive was almost full. I normally keep about 10% of it empty, but sure enough it was down to less than a gig. At a loss, I started looking for processes or downloads but could find nothing. I deleted what temporary stuff I could to free up some room and eventually got up to about 12 gigs free, but this morning it's down to 7. I have no idea how I lost over 20 gigs of room when I wasn't downloading or making anything. I searched through the space the file folders were taking up and nothing immediately jumps out as being 20 gigs larger than it should be. Any ideas?
Click to expand...
You may have better success in attracting responses to your thread, and you'll make your thread easier to find for those browsing the forum for the same answers, if you change your thread title, as "memory" refers to RAM, but your issue relates to disk space, not memory. To do so, click the "Edit" button on your original post, then click "Go Advanced" and you will see where to edit the thread title.

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion storage tab is about, this may help explain:
For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:
  • Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
  • For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.
    OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs
  • Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
    attachment.php
  • Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
  • Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
  • Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes
Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:
 
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