Why does OS X Slowly consume my hard drive?

[thejadedmonkey]

I'm a little mystified here.

I ran out of hard drive space. 7 gigs left out of 85. So I wiped and reinstalled, to try to speed things up, get rid of any fragmentation, etc. I have yet to install Photoshop, and I think I may have a few .plist files left to transfer over, but right now, with ALL of my data back on it, I have 35 gigs free. That's 28 more then I did before.

Where in the world does 28 gigs appear from, and how can I keep my mac from slowly taking it back over time?

 

[r.j.s]

Out of control log files maybe?

There are some free programs that can show you what files are taking up all your space, DiskInventoryX is one, and free IIRC.

 

[Eidorian]

Sleep image and virtual memory swap space.

That's about RAM size + 64 to 512 MB right there.

 

[xUKHCx]

There are some free programs that can show you what files are taking up all your space, DiskInventoryX is one, and free IIRC.

Indeed, it would've been useful to run something like this before wiping the drive so you could see what was taking up the space rather than trying to place the guessing game afterwards.

Not to mention a lot quicker.

 

[ChrisA]

Where in the world does 28 gigs appear from, and how can I keep my mac from slowly taking it back over time?

There is no why to know now. Maybe that 28 GB was in the trash and you never did the "Empty Trash" thing. That's my guess -- a full trash folder but we can never know now. Unless you want to go searching around on one of your old backups

You should never have to re-install Mac OS X unless you have to replace the disk.

In the future you should look around and see which are you largest folders. It's easy to do in terminal. What I do is pile "ds" to "sort" and get a list of folders sorted by size.

Replacing the disk may be a good idea if your's is only 85GB. New disks have sizes up to 500GB. Put the old disk inside a USB encloses and use it to backup data or whatever.

 

[aristobrat]

Another way to find large files (if you don't want to mess with terminal) is OmniDiskSweeper.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

 

[h.21]

GrandPerspective. I swear by it.