[mpancha]

So I have been experiencing a problem for a few months now, and now its gotten to the point of aggravation.

I have an iBook (specs in sig), with a 30 gb drive. I haven't quite worked up the nerve to put a bigger hard drive in it yet, so I have to make due with what I already have. THe problem I'm experiencing is that my hard drive space keeps disappearing.

Right now I have 1.89 GB free on my drive. I should have at least 3.7GB free. I did a format 2 weeks ago, backed up all my important data prior to doing so, and copied it all back. What I copied was:

1) Mail
2) Mail Downloads
3) Documents folder
4) Music Folder
5) ical/address book/bookmarks databases
... and that's it.

After the format, I reinstalled every piece of software I had, and I was back up to 4 GB. Since then I have imported a few CDs which is what brings me to my 3.7 GB I should have remaining. Now.... why do I only have 1.89 GB free right now?

This same thing happened a few weeks prior to the format, except that time I was down to only 200 MB free, and same trends over the prior weeks for the past few months.

Any ideas.. and thanks in advance.

[JKT]

It's probably because of the virtual memory that has been paged to your hard disk as swapfiles. The swapfiles are of increasing size which are (IIRC): 64MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 1GB etc. So if you have 4 swapfiles, they will use 64+64+128+256MB of space = 512MB in total. 5 swapfiles will total 1.5GB. 6 will total 2.5GB, etc. (N.B. I might have mis-remembered the actual file sizes so it could be more than that for 4 swapfiles etc).

To see how many swapfiles are being created on your system, in the Finder, press Command-shift-G to get the "Go to folder" dialogue sheet, then type /private/var/vm/ and press Go to view your vm folder contents.

Note, you must not try to delete anything from here - the swapfiles are temporary and will be removed whenever you restart (however, you always have one 64MB swapfile when you start anew).

The solution - you need to clear space on your drive, install a bigger hard drive or, if your iBook has Firewire ports, an external hard drive you can move files to.

[Gordio]

Oh man this happened to me before. The blank portion kept shrinking and in the end, I got zero free space in my 80gb HD, even tho I should have 50. I did freak out. I forgot how I dealt with it, but I think i Just reinstalled OSX ( NOT formatting of course). I don't know why this happened. I think at the time, a mac update occurred right before so it could have been related.

To the above person, it's not that, cuz even when you restart, it says zero free space under the "information" of the mac HD. This is how my 80 gig HD looked: 27 gigs used, 0 free space, 27 gigs total.

edit: i reread your post. What do you mean you "formatted" it? So you did install OSX again? If so, I can't suggest anything...other than trying to install OSX w/o reformatting.

[mpancha]

Gordio >> by formatted I mean a complete format. I have an external USB 2 hard drive, I backed up all the items I listed in the original post to the hard drive. Then I did an "Erase and Install" of OS X (10.4).

JKT >> like Gordio said, even when I restart, I still have well below what I should have. Since I posted the original message I have dropped to below 1 GB free on my hard drive. All I have added to my computer is roughly 10 MB of email, and 50 MB of music.

When Leopard is released, I plan to crack open (hopefully not in the literal sense) my iBook and put in a 100 GB hard drive and a Super Drive.... hopefully leopard fixes this issue.

[bigmike]

One question: What is that "sleepimage" ? in the folder? it's 1.5 gb large. and yet I have not put my mbp to sleep.

[kick52]

its the safe sleep disk image.

when you have low battery, and you put your computer to sleep, it does safe sleep. this completely turns off the computer, and writes ram to hard drive. so you can turn on and it will be the same.

[jprice]

try fireing up terminal
type sudo lsof

This will output list of open files. look for stuff connecting to inodes instead of files, may be your problem. then ust use your rm cmd to delete them. When you delete a file and it is in use, information still gets written to your inodes of the hard drive clogging up space.

[Big Mac]

As others have noted, it's most likely the sleep image plus VM. The OS is fine and is doing what it's supposed to do. You could technically disable safe sleep, but the better solution is to get a larger drive or to remove unneeded files to free more space.

[slpdLoad]

Could be almost anything. I had a buggy MacAlley iShock II driver installed a while back that created an error log so big it filled my hard drive in a few hours. Needless to say I don't use it anymore.