lion eating my hard drive space

Georg Portenkirchner wrote:

. . .

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

Take that display with a very large grain of salt; it's dependent on Spotlight indexing, so may not be up to date, and it often seems to put things in the wrong category.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Try Where did my Disk Space go?

I have the same symptoms due to the Mail database creating copies of all attachments (see my post earlier in this thread).

I suggest you check the size of your Mail database in now hidden folder - open menu Go/Go to folder, then type /Users/username/Library and see if your Mail database is not growing. When you open the database structure you should find many folders named Attachments. They are not necessary to keep, as I found Mail is generating them probably only to speed the viewing of attachments or searching through them.

Andrej

Hello,

I am sure you can safely delete them. Check this info:

http://www.redpaw.co.uk/server/2011/04/attachments-folders-in-apple-mail.html

The terminal command to delete all the attachments folders at once is:

find -d ~/Library/Mail/ -type d -name Attachments -print -exec rm -rf {} \;

This is only a short term solution, as all those folders are reapearing again while using the Mail app.

Now I am trying to make an AppleScript script to execute the command every 10 minutes or so:-)

Andrej

You can also try turning off TimeMachine and then restarting your machine.

Well, turning off TimeMachine and leaving it off after you restart does in fact stop the MobileBackups and frees up the space being taken up by 'Backups' in the Storage report.

rsjm, I am happy this helped you.

Anyway, today my Mail app finaly stopped duplicating old attachments without any further intervention!

Now I think, that the process of generating duplicates was only supposed to happen once after migrating the database to the new version of Mail. Due to the fact, that the original size of my mail database (27GB) is almost 3 times the remaining free space on disk (10GB) I can understand, that I had to delete those folders while they kept growing...

After deleting all the attachments folders now Mails copies only those new attachments from mails, that I have read recently.

I should also point out, that before upgrading to Lion (in Leopard as well as Snow Leopard) I was regulary deleting the Attachments folder from mail database to gain disk space (there was only one folder before). Therefore my mail database was probably not typical - I suppose, that if a user did keep those attachments in mail database before, he woud not see the loss of disk space after Lion installation.

Andrej

Last night I ran Disc Utility and it found some hard link problems and could repair these, but it could not find any other problem. Also did sudo periodic daily weekly monthly. On time my free disc space is less than 1 GB and getting the error message to delete files.

Checking now the size of the Mail folder in my Library folder, but the size is "only" 5 GB, seems to be ok for the huge amount of e-mails I have stored.

I just activated the status bar for Finder windows and now I can watch how fast the free disc space is disappearing. Without any programme active it is about 1 MB / min. This is really scary!

I personally haven't been able to confirm if the three suggestions below actually does anything to stop the free space from filling up because I personally don't have this issue with TM turned off, but I guess it is worth a shot:

System Preferences > TimeMachine > Options > Change Lock documents to 1 day

OR

System Preferences > General > Number of recent items > Change Applications, Documents, & Servers to None

OR

Open Terminal and type: sudo tmutil disablelocal

AMMOCAN wrote:

I personally haven't been able to confirm if the three suggestions below actually does anything to stop the free space from filling up because I personally don't have this issue with TM turned off, but I guess it is worth a shot:

Please don't post solutions you aren't sure of.

System Preferences > TimeMachine > Options > Change Lock documents to 1 day

Controls when documents revised with a Versions-enabled app are locked. Has no effect on disk usage.

System Preferences > General > Number of recent items > Change Applications, Documents, & Servers to None

Prevents items from appearing in "Recent Items" menu items. No effect on disk usage.

Open Terminal and type: sudo tmutil disablelocal

If you have a laptop, and Time Machine is ON, that may gain some space. See #30 in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.