Missing disk space after deleting user

Hi,

I'd first use OmniDiskSweeper to find out where your space "went". Give it a try:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/

Björn

digitalFlack wrote:
I also did not take the erase option. Just deleted the accounts and added another.

Sorry for asking the obvious(?), but what exactly do you mean by that? If you don't choose to erase the user account OS X will create a folder called "Deleted Users" in /Users which contains disk images (.dmg) of the deleted user. These need to be deleted manually!

Björn

digitalFlack wrote:
When I logged into the new account the Finder said there is only 40GB of space available on an 80GB disk, i.e. 39GB in use. The System, Library, User and Applications folders add up to about 18GB, so I'm trying to find the missing (approximately) 20GB.

In addition to the various caches & other temporary files, OS X installs includes a number of hidden folders like private/ & files like mach_kernel, all of which use disk space that won't be included by summing up the System, Library, User, and Applications folder contributions. However, they should not use more than a few extra GB, so it would seem you do have something amiss.

I'm not sure what you mean about "rebuilding directory structures," but if it doesn't mean that you have used Disk Utility's Repair Disk function, you should make that your first step in fixing things. Also note that you should not under any circumstances use a disk utility that is not specifically designed for Leopard to repair or otherwise alter a Leopard volume's file system -- they will not understand the changes Leopard has made & will most likely make things worse rather than better.

I've never had occasion to delete a user, so not really sure how that works, is supposed work, and what can go wrong. However, I outlined a procedure for finding missing drive space that all other things miss in this article:

http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/TigerMisc.html

The somewhat tedious Terminal method described hasn't failed yet.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Francine Schwieder wrote:
I've never had occasion to delete a user, so not really sure how that works, is supposed work, and what can go wrong.

When you delete a user account via the Accounts system preference, as an administrator you are given three choices:

1. Save the account's home folder as a disk image, which is moved to a deleted users folder in /Users/
2. Do not change the home folder, in effect making it owned by no user account
3. Delete the home folder completely

Choices 1 & 2 obviously don't free up the disk space used by the deleted account's home folder & the folder or its image remain in /Users/. For choice 1, the space used by the dmg file is obvious; for choice 2, the same restrictions on showing size info for other accounts apply -- you can not see the space used for folders you do not have access to, although you can see that the folders exist.

With either choice, you can later move the "orphaned" home folder or image file to the trash by authenticating as an admin user when requested. Once the trash is emptied, the space used should be freed up just as if choice 3 was used.

To this extent, no significant disk space used by a deleted account should be hidden -- everything in /Users/ should be visible with the exception of the normal invisible housekeeping items like .ds_stores, if present.

I don't believe your missing space issue has anything directly to do with disk fragmentation -- that only affects continuous chunks of available free space, not the overall amount of it available on the volume. Your files could be fragmented into thousands of discontinuous chunks across many different tracks & the only thing that would happen is that they would take longer to load. Free sectors are free sectors, no matter where they are, & their total is the available free space of the volume, period.

However, you still haven't explained what you meant about rebuilding the directory or how you did that. As before, I strongly suggest you run Disk Utility from the Leopard Utilities folder & check the drive's file structures with the "Verify Disk" First Aid function before doing anything else. It isn't impossible that you have cross-linked files or other problems that make files seem to use sectors they do not, some possibly caused by using a disk utility that isn't designed for Leopard's file system enhancements.

Also, it might help if you copied the du command you used & its output from Terminal to a post -- it should show quite a bit more than the folders & sizes you listed in your last post, so we would have a better idea of how much space actually is unaccounted for.

Too late to include in my last reply, I noticed your comment about needing to copy the files to an unjournaled partition somewhere. Journalling doesn't have any effect on file size or fragmentation -- it is essentially a method of recording pending file changes so that should that process be interrupted, the file system knows what files might be out-of-date without going through the entire file system.

More to the point, in a UNIX-based system like OS X, you cannot simply manually copy system-related directories from volume to volume on a piecemeal basis & expect to preserve the internal links they depend on for correct interoperation. (This is why you can't produce a bootable clone of an OS X installation with a Finder copy.) You can freely copy user files this way (assuming you preserve access permissions as required for your purposes) but not system files. You may or may not be successful copying applications this way, depending on the application & how it is installed.

If you are giving away or selling the computer, you also need to consider licensing issues: if you install Leopard or other licensed commercial software on the computer, you must generally also include the license to use it. So for instance, you should not install commercial applications on the computer if you wish to retain the license to use it on the computer you retain. This being the case, you might as well reinstall the OS & any apps from the disks you include with the computer, or just wipe its drive & let the new owner start from scratch.

Afraid I keep my Trash always empty, but if the permission is denied, use a super user do command again. As I recall there may well be a sub-folder in the .Trashes with the account number. You may have more than one, if something is also in a sub-folder for your own account. You can check your account's number, since you'll be in the Terminal anyway, by typing the "id" command. You'll get something like this:

NoobiX:~ francine$ id
uid=501(francine) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),102(com.apple.sharepoint.group.2),98(_lpadmin),101 (com.apple.sharepoint.group.1),80(admin),501(francine)

The "uid=501" is my account number. You'll want to remove the stuff in the folder that has a number other than your own--that should be the trashed other account (presuming you only had two accounts on the computer).

So you would change directory into the .Trashes folder, do a sudo ls -alh on the directory you think is the trashed account, then remove things recursively:

NoobiX:~ francine$ cd /.Trashes
NoobiX:.Trashes francine$ sudo ls -al
Password:
d-wx-wx-wt@ 2 root _unknown 68B Feb 15 12:51 .
drwxrwxr-t@ 37 root admin 1.3K Feb 16 23:01 ..
drwx------@ 4 francine staff 136 Feb 22 22:17 501
drwx------@ 4 other staff 136 Feb 22 22:17 502
NoobiX:.Trashes francine$ cd 502
NoobiX:502 francine$ sudo ls -al
total 16
drwx------@ 4 other staff 136 Feb 22 22:17 .
d-wx-wx-wt@ 4 root admin 136 Feb 22 22:03 ..
-rw-------@ 1 other staff 6148 Feb 22 22:17 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x 2 other admin 68 Feb 22 22:09 folders
and so on (list of folders from the deleted account)

When you are sure that you are in the correct folder (in the case above it is /.Trashes/502) you can do a sudo remove. You can NOT undo a sudo remove so that is why I recommend doing the list command to be sure you are going to be removing the correct stuff. So put yourself back up into the .Trashes directory, cd /.Trashes will do it, then issue the remove recursively command:

NoobiX:.Trashes francine$ sudo rm -r 502

That should nuke the 502 folder and all that it contains. Again, this example may not be the exact number of your deleted account. Generally the first admin account is 501, the next account is 502, and so on. Your uid numbers may be different.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder