[Pale Rider]

I apologize if this has been covered elsewhere, and I suspect this is a really stupid question. But I have twice in the past ten days had the experience of watching 10-15 gb of hard drive space disappear. When it last happened, I just reformatted/partitioned my drive and restored from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup. I have a nominal 60gb HD in my TiBook 500 with two partitions: one for 6gb for OS 9 and the remainder for OS X. Last night, my machine had over 15gb free space on the OS X partition. This morning, I woke my machine up from sleep [but lots of disk activity] and actually watched the Finder toolbar go from 15.68gb free space to 172kb!

I have searched for any large new files, etc., but no luck. I have rebooted and run fsck, but no change.

Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated. I am running 10.2.2, and 1gb RAM in an original TiBook 500. TIA!

[chris v]

go to folder:
/private/var/vm

How many swap files are there?

Maybe you're running an app with a memory leak.

CV

[Pale Rider]

Originally posted by chris v:
go to folder:
/private/var/vm

How many swap files are there?

Maybe you're running an app with a memory leak.

CV

Thanks for the quick reply. There are two swap files there: swapfile0 and swapfile1. Each is 76.3mb in size.

[chris v]

Originally posted by Pale Rider:


Thanks for the quick reply. There are two swap files there: swapfile0 and swapfile1. Each is 76.3mb in size.

Hmm... that's not abnormal. Well, I'm fresh out of ideas. Does restarting correct it?

CV

[SMacTech]

Try viewing your hard drive in list view, by Size with Calculate all sizes view options on.
Use something that will show invisible files, such as TinkerTool. Then you can maybe locate where the files may be located.

[Pale Rider]

Originally posted by chris v:


Hmm... that's not abnormal. Well, I'm fresh out of ideas. Does restarting correct it?

CV

Unfortunately, it does not.

[Pale Rider]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Try viewing your hard drive in list view, by Size with Calculate all sizes view options on.
Use something that will show invisible files, such as TinkerTool. Then you can maybe locate where the files may be located.

I am seeing a 15gb folder in the normally-invisible Volumes folder. The Volumes folder contains a subfolder for each of my hard drive partitions, it looks like. One of them appears to be a 0kb alias to my OS 9 partition; but the other looks like a 15gb replica of the cloned backup drive I used to restore this drive from. It is not an alias.

What can I do about this, and why is it happening?

[Gee4orce]

Go and download Omni DiskSweeper.

Many a time it has turned up a lost or forgotten file that was taking up tons of HD space on my machine.

Also, look in /var/log for large log files - sometimes if you're running a unix process with debugging on it can run up gigabytes of log file in no time. The most I ever saw was a 13Gb log file for OpenLDAP - and that was in 1 day !

[Oneota]

Originally posted by Pale Rider:


I am seeing a 15gb folder in the normally-invisible Volumes folder. The Volumes folder contains a subfolder for each of my hard drive partitions, it looks like. One of them appears to be a 0kb alias to my OS 9 partition; but the other looks like a 15gb replica of the cloned backup drive I used to restore this drive from. It is not an alias.

What can I do about this, and why is it happening?

Your boot volume should not have an entry in the /Volumes folder, so if there's a copy of your boot disk in there, it's probably safe to delete it. The only thing that should be in /Volumes is mounted disks other than the boot drive (CDs, other HD partitions, Zip disks, etc).

[chris v]

Originally posted by Pale Rider:


I am seeing a 15gb folder in the normally-invisible Volumes folder. The Volumes folder contains a subfolder for each of my hard drive partitions, it looks like. One of them appears to be a 0kb alias to my OS 9 partition; but the other looks like a 15gb replica of the cloned backup drive I used to restore this drive from. It is not an alias.

What can I do about this, and why is it happening?

That would appear to be your culprit. There's nothing here in my /volumes except alises, which I believe is how it should be. Why it's getting written there overnight is beyond me. What backup software are you using?

CV

[Oneota]

Ooops..gotta change my story a bit.

Ya, /Volumes should contain aliases to mounted drives. They should *not* contain folders masquerading as existing drives, though.

[Pale Rider]

Originally posted by Oneota:
Ooops..gotta change my story a bit.

Ya, /Volumes should contain aliases to mounted drives. They should *not* contain folders masquerading as existing drives, though.

This comment and the previous one about backup software got me thinking. As I mentioned at the top, I use CCC for backup purposes. A couple of weeks ago, I added a backup schedule to CCC [which it seems is really just a GUI front-end for cron in that particular capacity].

Apparently, that backup schedule worked just fine until one night when I did not attach the external firewire drive. And cron proceeded to create the backup directly on the hard drive, until it ran out of disk space.

My thanks to all for the quick replies, and my apologies for not seeing my own error sooner.

[iPond317]

Don't know if this has any relevance to what is being discussed or not, but lately I have been having a similar problem. I have a TiBook 400 with 512MB and a 10GB HD. Since upgrading to 10.2.2 I have noticed a lot of pageouts, not just a lot but tons! But anyway, what usually happens is as my system pages out, I will lose hard disk space until the next time I reboot then I have my space back. This is a problem that needs to be fixed. I'm only running programs like iTunes 3.0.1, Adium, IE5.2, and Mail usually. So what's the deal here?