[PatsPalace24]

PLEASE GUYS, i really need your help. All of a sudden, my 80gb harddrive on my powerbook is now showing up it has 4 gigs left. I realize that it is not truly 80gb, but still, just say 73gb has now gone down to 4. Where did it all go? Do you all recommend anything to figure out where exactly everything went (like program to show "pie graph" of hard drive space). Also, I have a bunch of Adobe and Macromedia programs that I have on my computer, that I don't necessarily use, but I still want them. What is the easiest way to delete/uninstall them, but also back them up to cd so that I can once again re-install them once I get this whole thing worked out? Thanks alot!

Please HELP!

[Londor]

Run OmniDiskSweeper.

I bet you have NAV installed.

[LethalFrog]

From the many years of administering unix and only the last six months of Mac ownership, I revert to unix world.

Enter the following command in terminal or xterm

cd /
sudo du -sh *

You will need to enter your admin password.

This will produce a human readable usage list from the root file system (/).

Once you see where the bulk is "cd" to that folder and run the du command again each time you will see where there usage is.

On my system I still get a lot of permission denied but the bulk of usage was Users.

Just look back at the usage and work from there.

Please be carefull, do NOT just delete things you think can be removed.

The biggest culprit will be iTunes, iPhoto and Internet Caches.

[PatsPalace24]

Please, keep responding. I am stunned at my sudden problem and need help. For OmniSweeper, I d/ld that, but what exactly should I do? You said NAV? What is NAV? Weird thing is, I started w/ 4 gigs of free space, deleted 3 gigs of music, and now it still says 4 gigs. WTF? Thanks alot for any and all help! I need it!

[David Hagan]

You wouldn't happen to use Final Cut Pro HD? I had an issue where it sucked up my entire hard drive within about 3 seconds of a log and capture.

[Londor]

Launch OmniDiskSweeper. Choose your HD and click on the "Sweep Selected Drive" button. It will tell you what is taking up the space in your HD.

NAV- Norton Antivirus.

[PatsPalace24]

No, actually, I dont, but I have found out something extremely interesting. Thanks to the OmniSweep post, I figured out how to use that and pinpointed a whopping 53 gigs of space in one folder, named .Patrick, and inside that file named Patrick.sparseimage This file has a FILEVAULT symbol w/ it, so I think it might be from when I backed up my system, which was a complete waste, dont do it. But I am on the way to the APple store now just to make sure it is ok to delete this file, dont want to screw up anyhting. BUT I MIGHT HAVE IT! Thanks sooo much guys!

[mintcake]

You were wondering why deleting something hadn't given you more space - don't forget to empty the Trash. Otherwise it's not *really* deleted.

[adambooth]

I use a program called WhatSize for this. I'd google it. What it basically does is scan the drive and show much how space is being used and where. Pretty handy.

[tictactoe]

I'm glad somebody brought this up. I have a 60gig hard drive, 54 or so actual, and it says that I have only 14 gigs left. I'm not quite sure what I have that takes up 40 gigs. I have 4 gigs of applications, less than a gig of music and not much else. I ran the nix commands and came out with my "Users" directory being 46 gigs, but when I check it on OS X, it says it is only 30gigs, which is perplexing not only because of the 16 gig differential, but because I don't have 30 gigs worth of files in there.

Edit: I used OmniSweep and found a file that is <myusername>.sparseimage within the users folder. I am using file vault, which is the icon that this file displays. Is it safe to delete this? It is taking up 30.5gigs!

[wy4tt]

Turning Filevault on evidently uses up a great deal of space. Perhaps if you turn FileVault off, in security, it may remove that folder. I was playing around with filevault, and I couldn't turn it on due to too little HD space (needed 30+ gigs, and only had 20).

[Agent69]

According to MacOSXHints, sparse images can grow but don't compact on their own. You can normally compact sparse images with the hdiutil command but I am not sure what you can do if you are using them with File Vault.

Personally, if I was only concerned with the security of a few key files, I would go with an encrypted disk image and not use File Vault.

[urrl78]

Incidently, I also had the GIG eating problem with captured files on Final Cut Express but after being advised to set the capture time limit at, say, two hours the problem vanished.