lion eating my hard drive space

exactly the same issue 😠

Are you using Time Machine? If so, have you tried turning it off for a while? If the problem is Local snapshots, that will delete them pretty rapidly.

I may have the same problem. I deleted 50Gb of movie files, trashed them and emptied the trash. Since then I have also run maintenance scripts and re-booted.

Now there is a discrepancy between information on various utilities. I think the true free space I have now is around 150Gb per the MacIntosh HD Get Info. Disk Utility and Activity Monitor still show the old information

About This Mac Info is a bit more helpful. Something called Backup, that I cannot find (the Backup folder on the HD shows empty), is taking 52Gb. But What?

Yes, disabling the local snapshots from time machine gave me space back. In fact, I ended up with more Go than before Lion !

I will continue monitoring the HD usage and post here if I see any other issue. I also have the feeling that the CPU usage from mdworker and hiutil that lots of people are due to this, with the spotlight indexer continuously trying to index the always growing snapshots files. I had no big CPU usage due to thoose process since, I will also update here.

Thanks, that solved my problem too. All information is now in agreement. 52Gb of Backup was Snapshots!

I think Apple need to put this as a separate item on Disk Utility and Activity Monitor to avoid confusion.

I have sent a Bug Report to Apple and asked that they make Snapshot disk usage a separate item from the normal user usage, in Disk Utility and Activity Monitor. I wont be using Snapshots for now.

Go into Time Machine Preferences and slide the big switch to the OFF position.

I just did a backup, waited that time machine is finished (just to be sure it will not run in the middle of the process but you could also turn it of meanwhile), did the terminal command line, right click to display the time machine preferences (small hang up due to time machine purging the local snapshots), see that it was ok, see that my hard drive was back, and checked that /Volumes/Backups (or something) was actually out of the way 🙂

Similary to other reports here after installing Lion my disk space is shrinking by every minute.

I found the problem is the Mail database (inside of User/Library) is almost doubling in size because while the Mail application is running, it creates separate folders within the database containing only attachements from mails. I keep deleting those folders but they are generated again. Deleting the Attachments folder does not remove the attachment from the mail message itself.

I suppose the process is intended for spotlight to be able to search within attachments.

I also found, that Snow Leopard did similar thing but not from all mail messages, there was some logic in what attachments were saved to Library and they allways represented only small portion of all mail.

My database was about 20 GB before upgrade, now is about 38GB in Lion!

Does anyone know a way to stop this? I am out of disk space (zero bites free:-).

Andrej

I have the same problem. After installing Lion I had more than 15 GB free. Two days later I got the error message I have to delete files because my disc is full. I had less than 1 GB free. I deleted some files to have at least 4 GB free space. Just a few hours later it was again less than 1 GB.

Time Machine backup drive was connected all the time.

Will now turn off Time Machine and restart my Mac!

So turning off Time Machine and restarting my Mac changed nothing.

Also disabling mobile backups with the sudo tmutil disablelocal and restarting my Mac gave me no disc space back.

Seems the yellow bar (other files) is getting long and longer!

Any other ideas or suggestions?