[jay3ld]

somethings eating my gb

our users folder is taking only 8 gb and app 2 gb
thats only 10 gb took

so y does our mac say we have used 32 gbs!!!

[Chuckit]

Do you have multiple users? Doing a "Get Info" on the /Users folder doesn't really tell you how much space everybody is using. Since you can't read other people's folders, it won't see most of the space they're taking.

[Big Mac]

If you've checked each folder at the root level of your hard drive for their sizes and still see a discrepancy, the most likely explanation is Virtual Memory - open Activity Monitor and click the System Memory button to see the size of your VM swap. My G5's swap space is 19.1GBs right now. There are also invisible Unix folders. Chuckit also has a great point about other user folders which I wasn't aware of until now.

[IamBob]

*cough*music*cough*

The first thing I do on my systems is create a Music folder (mobiles) or partition (desktops). I partition the desktops mostly because they have Classic and the mobiles don't...works for us.

Of course, then you have to force your users to change iTunes' preferences to use this shared folder since it defaults to ~/Music. This can be kind of a pain if you add a new user and forget to do it right away. The new user could "Add to Library..." and inadvertently copy all the shared music into their ~/Music folder, eating tons of space.

IIRC, YMMV, etc.

[jay3ld]

ok wow.
i thought mac dropped the virtual memory deal

[Devin Lane]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
If you've checked each folder at the root level of your hard drive for their sizes and still see a discrepancy, the most likely explanation is Virtual Memory - open Activity Monitor and click the System Memory button to see the size of your VM swap. My G5's swap space is 19.1GBs right now. There are also invisible Unix folders. Chuckit also has a great point about other user folders which I wasn't aware of until now.

Big Mac: That VM number is NOT how much disk space the VM system is using. I'm not sure exactly how to explain what it is, but be assured that your system is not actually using 19.1GB of your hd space.

[mdc]

whatsize is really neat. it will scan your hard disk and sort all your folders in column view by size. really helpful for finding where all your space is.

[wadesworld]

ok wow.
i thought mac dropped the virtual memory deal

Um....no.

Wade

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by jay3ld:
i thought mac dropped the virtual memory deal

Why on earth would Apple do that? A modern OS without virtual memory would be a laughingstock.

[Randman]

First of all, don't partition. The people who say that are coming from a PC background.
If the size has shifted recently, it's likely swap files. You say you have multiple users? Do you share music or does everyone have their own folder? Have you done any video editing lately as that can eat space quickly.
Finally, OmniDiskSweeper is a great app to track down your space as well as let you see something you don't need (for instance, I have a Canon printer so I deleted all printer profiles except for Canon and saved a good deal of space). I can always reinstall them if needed.

[CharlesS]

One thing to note is that Apple hides a huge amount of stuff by default. There are a bunch of invisible folders on the root level of the drive with names like usr, bin, sbin, and private which can take up multiple GBs of space in some situations.

Also, there's more on the hard disk than just Applications and Users. You should take System and Library into account, at least, in that total space used.

[Randman]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
One thing to note is that Apple hides a huge amount of stuff by default. There are a bunch of invisible folders on the root level of the drive with names like usr, bin, sbin, and private which can take up multiple GBs of space in some situations.

Also, there's more on the hard disk than just Applications and Users. You should take System and Library into account, at least, in that total space used.

That wouldn't account for such a huge amount of space.

How much ram do you have? Do you run an app such as Cocktail or Onyx regularly? Have you tried logging out or restarting and seeing if the numbers change any? You don't have any partitions, do you? Has anyone created any encrypted disk images?
Do you have iDVD and/or Garageband? Have they been used? Any video importing? Has anyone been downloading a staggering amount of pr0n?

How much music do you have on it as well?

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Randman:
That wouldn't account for such a huge amount of space.

Actually, I've seen problems like this before. Some app gets stuck in an infinite loop while making a temp file, and keeps doing until you run out of HD space, so you get a file the size of your entire hard disk in /tmp, which is invisible.

I'd try the whatsize app that someone recommended earlier and see if you have any invisible folder that's really huge. If there is, then you can go track it down and see if it's a rogue temp file or something.

Another possibility is that you could have a lot of third-party UNIX stuff installed in /usr/local...

[jay3ld]

we do have our own music folders but theres not much in any. most are on cds or burned to our custom cds and off the hd. and rest are online songs.

[bjresta]

Okay, what's going on here?

I recently installed a new 120 gig internal hard drive in my old slot iMac (replacing the 20 gig original drive.

I made the transfer by cloning the contents of the original drive to a volume on the external drive by using Carbon Copy Cloner. I then installed the new internal drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of the external volume to a new volume on my new internal hard drive (I partitioned the new drive into three equal partitions.

After a few days of running off the new internal drive, and without adding any significant files, I found that Disk Utility and Get Info both reported a larger amount of disk space used than I anticipated.

The original internal hard drive used 19 GB out of 20 GB capacity.

The external hard drive volume now shows 19 GB used out of 38 GB

The new internal hard drive volume shows 31 GB used out of 37.8 GB.

I have used the WhatSize application to locate any hidden files that are eating up space. I do not find any. Indeed, WhatSize shows that the files and folders (both visible and invisible) on the new internal hard drive volume are equal in size to the files and folders on the external hard drive volume.

So... what is eating up the space? Why doesn't it show up using WhatSize? What can I do about it?



iMac slot 450 MHz
i GB SDRAM
Mac OS X version 10.3.8