Mysteriously losing storage

Hi Rob;

Installing Norton Virus Checker was probably the worst thing you could have done.

I suggest that you go to the Symantec website or with the Symantec CD get a copy of the only good code Symantec has even written uninstall it. It will only cause you more problems not less.

It sounds like you have a log file that is running away. You might want to open Console and look at the log files and see if any of them appear to be in a loop.

Allan

You can try a program like Disk Inventory X, which shows you a graphical representation of all your files by size.

It sounds like you do a shutdown every night, then start up in the morning. If that's always true, then your maintenance scripts may not be running in the early hours.

One of the them (the monthly, I think) rotates your log files, and deletes the oldest.

Since you're familiar with Console, a quick way to check is to look at the +daily.out, weekly.out,+ and monthly.out log files (in the Console sidebar).

The easiest way to run them is to just sleep your Mac overnight once every week or two. They'll run automatically, shortly after you wake your Mac.

Actually, many of us follow Apple's recommendation not to do a full shutdown unless the Mac will be off for a few days; we use the Sleep function instead.

Open Terminal
cut and paste (or type) and run the command below and the files, largest to smallest,
will be displayed for you.

to display size in kilobytes:
sudo cd /;du -I net -d 24 -ck -x * | sort -n -r;echo done

to display size in gigabytes:
sudo cd /;du -I net -d 24 -cg -x * | sort -n -r;echo done

to display size in megabytes:
sudo cd /;du -I net -d 24 -cm -x * | sort -n -r;echo done

Kj

aslmanager ( /var/log/asl ) sometimes has runaway log files.

oh BTW this format of the du command is a little more reliable:
cd /;sudo du -I net -d 24 -ck -x * | sort -n -r;echo done

Kj