[rilina]

I can't quite figure out what's happened to all my hard drive space.

When I looked my hard drive, it says it has 55.57 GB space.

The main folders in "Macintosh HD" take up the following amount of space respectively:

Applications 4.99 GB
Library 9.33 GB
System 1.82 GB
Users 20.93 GB

By my math, that accounts for about 37 GB of my 55.57 GB.

But my computer is telling me I only have 6.88 GB available. So almost 10 GB unaccounted for.

What gives? And how can I get that space back?

ETA: I restarted and now it says at I have 7.84 GB available. But there's still a lot of space that's just not there.

[stefanicotine]

This has happened to me before too. A fresh install took care of it, but I needed to do a reinstall anyways. I'm sure there's a way to fix this without being quite so drastic. Perhaps it's something simple? Have you emptied your trash? Before you answer that, you might want to think about all of the different programs that have their own trash cans: iPhoto, iMovie, etc.

[Spliff]

Try OmniDiskSweeper 1.5 or Disk Inventory X 1.0. They'll show you all the files on your system (including hidden ones) and how much space they're using up.

[rilina]

I downloaded Disk Inventory and it showed me that there was a 10 GB hidden volume on my hard drive. It had the same name as my external hard drive, which suggests that something went wrong with that once, causing the duplicate. Anyway, I used TinkerTool to show the hidden files in the finder, deleted it, and now have all that lovely space back.

Thank you for your help!

[Hi I'm Ben]

I've had a similiar thing happen where OS X created a 16GB error log file.

[peterauch21]

Hmm, ive been curious as to were some of my space has gone too. I was using what size but I'll check out Disk inventory to see if it is any different. I'll let you guys know which is better once I'm done. =D

[Tomchu]

That's because you're not taking into account all of the other directories on your hard drive --

/bin
/cores
/private
/sbin
/usr

[amazing]

And if you're using a MacBook, the penalty for "safe sleep" is a hidden file that's the size of your RAM plus 750 MB. If you've got 2 GB of RAM, that hidden file is 2.75 GB in /var/vm

[Tomchu]

Originally Posted by amazing 

And if you're using a MacBook, the penalty for "safe sleep" is a hidden file that's the size of your RAM plus 750 MB. If you've got 2 GB of RAM, that hidden file is 2.75 GB in /var/vm

That's wrong.

The size of the sleep image is exactly equal to the amount of RAM that you have.

Code:
[Tom]~: ls -l /var/vm
total 2162688
drwx--x--x   16 root  wheel         544 Nov 26 11:10 app_profile
-rw------T    1 root  wheel  2147483648 Nov 28 10:25 sleepimage
-rw------T    1 root  wheel    67108864 Nov 25 15:27 swapfile0

I have 2 GB of RAM. 2 GB = 2,147,483,648 bytes.

[mg196]

I am encountering a very similiar problem. One day I log off w/ 5GB left on my HD, and the next it is 500MB. I have seen a few hidden files pop up in app menus, but have no way of figuring out exactly where they are or how to dump them (old torrent files, mpg, and DVD files).

I have tried the progs mentioned here, but perhaps I just dont know how to utilize them properly. I have searched for the names of the files, of which I have several, but no dice.

Any help, y'all? If anyone has a step-by-step, all the better.

For example, on my external HD, I open up FFMPEGX and go to open a file, and voila...there is the list of hidden files! Now how the F*nk do I delete 'em:



I have an iMac 15" flatscreen and Western Digital external HD, running OSX 10.3.9

[xsphat]

Within the first week I had my MacBook, an unaccounted 15 gigs was used. I also opted for a fresh install and have not since had the problem. This happened right around the time I upgraded my RAM and got an external HD. No clue if that had anything to do with it though.

[cman8]

I just got an external and Im downloading to it and instead of the 5 gigs I had to begin with, I know after deleting a bunch of stuff only have 1.31 gb. What the HECK! can someone help with this frustrating topic.

[mg196]

Originally Posted by stefanicotine 

This has happened to me before too. A fresh install took care of it, but I needed to do a reinstall anyways. I'm sure there's a way to fix this without being quite so drastic. Perhaps it's something simple?

Yes, you are 100% correct! I found this answer online:

In most cases, there really are files occupying part of the volume, but the files are invisible in normal use of the Finder. Using the Finder’s Go to Folder feature (in the Go menu), look at the sizes of the contents of these folders, by pasting in these pathnames:

/private/var/vm
/private/var/log
/Volumes

Personally, I checked the "/volumes" directory and found my missing space.