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Completely Confused by Disk Usage

I own a Macbook with an 80GB drive. I use the computer very often, but not excessively (I use it mostly daily for web browsing, no games, development, and don't use it for work).

My 80GB drive is just about full. It's so full I cannot perform a system update. I am flabbergasted at this, as I have virtually nothing on my hard disk. My girlfriend has a macbook and she is experiencing the same issues.

There is nothing particularly interesting about how I use this computer ,that the hard disk would be full. I even keep my iTunes library on another drive completely.

I ran Command+I on each folder in my home directory; this covers the location of all my documents, photos, videos, etc. I added up all these values and it comes to just over 40GB. So somewhere on my system there is 40GB (!!!) of space being used for apparently no reason.

I would understand between 5 - 10 GB for applications and the OS, but 40?!?

Would anybody be able to help me understand how Mac OS X uses the file system and perhaps why I have 40GB of mysteriously used disk space?

Thanks

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Jun 30, 2008 6:42 PM

Reply
14 replies

Jun 30, 2008 6:56 PM in response to NYY96

first restart you computer. If you haven't done it in a long time your swap file may have gotten very big. restarting will reset it to the default size.

also try [WhatSize|http://whatsize.en.softonic.com/mac] or [Omindisksweeper|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper> to search out what's taking all the space.

Jun 30, 2008 6:57 PM in response to Thomas Bryant

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I have used OnyX to perform some of these maintenance operations. I'm also a bit nuts about clearing my private data in web browsers. At times I've also left it on overnight, and I regularly repair permissions.

Would Mac OS X store attachments in my mail application to some strange location on disk?

Jun 30, 2008 11:27 PM in response to NYY96

Take a look at the article I wrote on disappearing space for Tiger. The information still applies in Leopard, and the methods discussed will work just as well.

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

There are a number of things that can gobble up drive space that one isn't aware of, and, so far as I know, none of the handy drive inventory utilities will find all the problems. The Terminal method will.
Francine

User uploaded file
Francine
Schwieder

Jul 1, 2008 7:34 PM in response to Francine Schwieder

Thank you for your helpful reply. Running a disk usage report on the root of the file system, I see:

2.1G /.com.apple.NetBootX
156K /.fseventsd
121M /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
0B /.vol
6.4G /Applications
7.6M /bin
0B /cores
512B /dev
1.0K /home
12G /Library
1.0K /net
0B /Network
2.7G /private
5.2M /sbin
3.9G /System
43G /Users
1.0G /usr
20K /Volumes
71G /
71G total

Taking a look at this, there's over 5 Gigs in /private and /.com/.apple/.NetBootX. Is there anything I could remove from these directories? Alos, I support I have more programs installed than I realized. Heh, my 80GB drive looks like it only gives me 74 available gigs when formatted. I've only got a single partition. I know it needs swap space, but that seems a little odd.

Any suggestions?

Jul 1, 2008 8:15 PM in response to NYY96

/private/var/vm is most likely where most of the 2GB you are seeing is located.

/private/var/vm is where Mac OS X maintains its swap files (aka the disk portion of Mac OS X virtual memory), and no you can not delete them nor get rid of them.

You can reboot your Mac and Mac OS X will clean out the /private/var/vm directory and start over again. But as soon as you try to cram 10 pounds of stuff into a 2 pound bag (run more stuff than can fit in memory), Mac OS X is going to grow the swap files to handle all the memory needs that exceed the memory available in your system.

Strongly suggest you get and try OmniDiskSweeper. It is really very good at helping you find where all your disk space has gone.

Jul 1, 2008 11:28 PM in response to NYY96

Actually the biggest problem is the 43GBs in the Users folder. How many users do you have on the computer? I think the most productive thing to do is to log into each user and clear stuff out. I remember one guy with the same sort of problem who discovered, when he logged into his wife's account, that her rather large iTunes library had been accidently duplicated to another directory at some point.
Francine

User uploaded file
Francine
Schwieder

Jul 4, 2008 12:45 PM in response to Francine Schwieder

Thank you all for your assistance. I'd like to take a closer look at the Library system folder. It is 12GB. This seems quite high to me, as you can typically run an entire OS distribution on less than 10GB.

Inside the Library, my subdirectory "Printers" is close to 4GB, most of that being drivers for Epson printers. I don't even have a printer, and if I were occasionally to use one, it almost certainly wouldn't be an Epson.

I have 2.49GB of sound effects for Garage Band in the Audio/Apple Loops folder. Garage Band is a program I used once to make a ringtone from an MP3 (Which I believe you can now do in iTunes).

The "Application Support" folder contains 2GB of data for Garage Band and 2GB for iDVD. iDVD is a program I may want to use at one point, but have never so far.

There is a 250MB file under the Receipts folder called db, as well as several pkg files that look like products I don't have.

Ok, so I understand what the Library folder is. I recognize that multimedia programs like Garage Band and iDVD may need a lot of resources to make neat looking projects. But the amount of space being utilized by these, and the printer drivers, seems nuts to me.

I wouldn't touch the Library folder manually since I know they are common resources, but is there ANYTHING I can do to shrink this folder down? Why should I have all these printer drivers that I will NEVER use! And can't I configure how these other programs are installed to remove unneeded components?

Jul 10, 2008 9:00 AM in response to NYY96

Let me repeat: your biggest (literally) problem is the 43GBs in your Users folder. That's where you are most likely to be able to save a significant amount of space. Find out which user has the most bloat and archive the unnecessary files to another drive and then delete them from your startup drive.

You can toss printer crud you don't need. If you don't currently use GarageBand or iDVD, but may in the future, archive their support files to another drive and then delete them.

Do NOT touch the Receipts folder. Ever.

What results do you get if you run this command:

sudo du -hd 1 /Users

Here's mine:

NoobiX:~ francine$ sudo du -hd 1 /Users
Password:
15M /Users/access
23G /Users/francine
975M /Users/revelator
13G /Users/Shared
37G /Users

This shows that the total in /Users is 37GBs, with my normal account being 23GBs, the bulk of which consists of movies, pictures, and aif files, the next biggest chunk of stuff is my iTunes library, which is in the Shared folder. My other two users, revelator and access, consume a trivial amount of space.
Francine

User uploaded file
Francine
Schwieder

Jul 11, 2008 4:43 AM in response to Otto Donkers

I actually don't use .mac.

My users folder looks like this:

45G /Users/James
175M /Users/Shared
45G /Users

The 45G is legitimate to me. I have photos and some videos on here. Music I have on an external drive. 45G out of 80 is less frightening to me than 77 out of 80.

I will take the great advice on the printer and Garage Band, etc.

Completely Confused by Disk Usage

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