Where the heck is all the space on my HD going?

[thekap'n]

Hey everyone,

I have had something really weird happening with my Mac the past few days.

I regularly have around 100-120 GB of free space on my hard drive that has about a 250 GB capacity.

Just a couple days ago I had a message pop up reading that I had no space remaining on my Start Up Disk. I thought this was really odd, so I went through and deleted or transferred a large amount of my unnecessary files, freeing up approx. 17 GB of space.

Then after returning to my iMac the next day, I found that the 17 GB of space I had freed was gone, and I was once again receiving the Start Disk is full error. The only applications I leave running over night is my Mail client and iTunes to update podcasts. Neither of which would ever eat up 17GB in one night.

Does anyone have an explanation as to why my drive space is just disappearing like this?

I have verified permissions, and the disk, both are all fine. My system specs are iMac 4,1, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 2 GHz Intel Duo Core, with Snow Leapord.

I hope someone knows whats up or has some tips, otherwise I'm transferring everything to an external drive and reformatting the HD.

-Kendall

 

[JonyHolt]

Do this:http://www.derlien.com/ (Disk Inventory X, tells you what data is where and how big it is.)

Second check here : Finder > Go > Go to folder... > type /cores/ > hit enter
If there is anything in there. Dump it and re-apply the last update you have done. (10.6.x) as it has been corrupted and is dumping excessively.

 

[thekap'n]

Thanks for help. That program worked like a charm and directed me to my online backup that was going crazy for some reason and frequently backing up to my HD in a hidden file instead of properly online. At 4.9 GB bursts it was quickly eating any space I had. I should have gone into terminal and turned on hidden files when I first saw the issue. I probably would have caught it when I went through my library.

Problem fixed now. Back to 120 GB free on the start up.


Thanks Again,

-Kendall

 

[S.B.G]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Another good app is Daisy Disk.

 

[iamthedudeman]

Both are very good.

Another is Whatsize.Freed up 34GB on my 256 SSD drive.

http://whatsizemac.com