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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > Hard Drive Space Really did Disappear

Hard Drive Space Really did Disappear
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cold aspiration
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:37 PM
 
Hey Guys,

I am convinced, one night I had about 6 gb of free space and the next morning I had about 700 mb. Then slowly this number went down to 0 mb. What the heck is going?

I ran a hard drive backup to my external lacie hd like I do almost every night and it was on overnight. I tried searching for large recently created files, no luck. I tried omni disk sweeper to look for large files that I don't know about and no luck either.

I've managed to free up about 1.6 gb by deleting odd little files here and there. A big folder was the cache for omniweb which was like 800 mb (wth?). I switched back to safari but if I leave safari open for too long my meager hd space slowly goes down further because of safari's memory leak.

any suggestions? I think something happened the night of the backup ... I want my hd space back. Thanks in advance !
     
Ganesha
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:40 PM
 
Check your log files in /var/log
     
cold aspiration  (op)
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:44 PM
 
Wow, thanks for the quick reply. I found the folder and it is a whopping 6.13GB. What is this folder anyway? I didn't even know of the existence of this whole directory "private/var/ ... "

Is it safe to delete the contents of the folder? Why did it get so big?
     
chris v
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:45 PM
 
If you've got a memory leak, vm swap files could be filling up your drive. I'm not sure if Omni Disk Sweeper will show vm files or not,but if you want to see how much drive space swap files are taking up, in the Finder use the Go> Go to Folder... dialog and type in /var/vm and it'll display the contents of the (usually hidden) virtual memory folder.

The only way to safely get rid of them is to reboot.

Edit: Too slow!

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift.
     
CharlesS
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:49 PM
 
Look inside /private/var/log, and see which specific log file has ballooned to this huge size. Then you'll know which program is doing that.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
cold aspiration  (op)
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:51 PM
 
Ok so in the log folder, i found one file that is 6.1 GB called windowserver_last.log . What is this file and can I delete it?

the vm folder is 1.8 gb. with 6 swapfiles about 120mb each. In there is also a 1gb sleep image file. I'm guessing that one is important for sleep function
     
CharlesS
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Jun 6, 2007, 08:58 PM
 
Huh, so it's something in the OS itself.

Try opening the file. There'll probably be one or two lines that get repeated over and over and over again. Maybe these lines will give us a clue as to what's doing this.

You could just delete the log file, but if something's going on and generating all those logs, it might just happen all over again.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
cold aspiration  (op)
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Jun 6, 2007, 09:27 PM
 
So it seems like my MBP can't handle a 6gig log file because I have to force quit the console after opening it. Anyway, I wrote down the line that repeats itself.

[856] (icp/rcv) invalid name: cgxRuneOneServerPass: mach_msg (g serviceset) failed (last rpc: LaunchAppRequestWithAuditInfo)

I'm pretty sure what I had going during the night was lacie HD hooked up, and backing up using SuperDuper! but I never had trouble with SuperDuper! before .. the HD on the other hand is new but I already backed up a few times on it without a hitch.

any ideas on what caused this?
( Last edited by cold aspiration; Jun 6, 2007 at 09:35 PM. )
     
Chuckit
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Jun 6, 2007, 09:38 PM
 
I've seen this problem a few times before, but it seems to be very rare. I haven't been able to find any commonality that causes it.
Chuck
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"Instead of either 'multi-talented' or 'multitalented' use 'bisexual'."
     
CharlesS
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Jun 7, 2007, 12:30 AM
 
Damn. Unfortunately, that line turns out to be something that I don't really know what it means.

Oh well. As the log line, which is most likely the only useful thing in that log file, is now preserved here, I think you're good to trash the log file. Hopefully, it won't grow to that size again. If it does, we'll have to try to figure out what's going on.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
cold aspiration  (op)
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Jun 7, 2007, 08:36 PM
 
Yeah I trashed the file and restarted. Hopefully it doesn't happen again but I am a bit perturbed about this being "unresolved"

Thanks everyone for the responses!
     
   
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