Hard Drive suddenly full

I had this same thing happen to me recently. I dumped a bunch of movies onto an external drive to free up space, and it happened again! It turned out to be related to a too-large e-mail attachment. I had tried to send an e-mail with a 35MB attachment using Mac Mail, but it wouldn't send because the file was too large for the server. Shortly after this I noticed that a "recovered messages" folder had appeared in my Mail sidebar. This folder was being repeatedly filled with copies of my rejected e-mail. By the time I discovered this, there were over 1600 of them in there. From what I can tell the only way to fix the problem is to remove that account from Mail and then re-create it. I tried clearing the files out manually, and even deleting the whole "Recovered Messages" folder, but it just kept coming back. I hope that helps!

Interesting I have a 300GB hard drive.

I show 0.5GB of available space

OmniDiskSweeper shows 57.2GB occupied

Someone is not telling the truth! 🙂

Any other suggestions?

Sounds like a runaway log file, possibly. To find out what's taking up the space, get a utility like [OmniDiskSweeper|http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper> or [GrandPerspective|http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net> (both free). Once you find the culprit, let us know what it is and we can help you fix it. You can also get some clues by opening the Console (in /Applications/Utilities) and looking for the log that is misbehaving.

I had this problem some time ago, and I did what Thomas advises. This is what I found: in /private/var/log there were 4 folders of log files - one was 28GB, another 25GB, and the other two a "mere" 3GB and 2GB respectively. In total, 58GB.

I checked via Google and found it was safe to delete folders/files from /private/var/log - did so and thus regained the hard disk space. These massive log files were generated within a space of 4 days by Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Note, though, that you shouldn't just delete the log files and think you're done. You should look in the log files to find out what is making them grow so large. Otherwise, you're just addressing a symptom, and leaving the problem unsolved... the log files may very well start growing out of control again as soon as you have deleted them.

This has been happening to me several times in the past few weeks. Today I found this post and looked in my console. The runaway app seems to be krb5kdc, which is part of Kerbelos. 2 logs took up 26 GB... Deleting them....

WOW! This was amazing. I had been completely baffled by this for a week now as nearly 200gb of space has disintegrated from my new hard drive. Turns out the culprit was the Recovered Messages folder. I'm going to look out for that from now on, and hopefully someone at the Apple Store can sort it out permanently this week.

cafitz wrote:

See the answers in your other thread.