lion eating my hard drive space

TechTool Protection was the culprit on my iMac running Lion. It had backed up several drives that I had connected to my machine. I have since turned off TechTool Protection & deleted all the backups with OmniDiskSweeper. Now, I am back to 232.93 gigs of free space once again.

Hi all,

I think I may have another take on this problem. One evening, my 5 year old MacBook pro slowed to a crawl and devoured 30Gb of my quite small disk. i quickly learned about the local backup (though not why it got it into its head to start that evening) and I disabled it. I never recovered the disk space ...

... until today.

Today, using spotlight to track down a mislaid file, I discovered it's path seemed to turning back in on itself. The path looked something like

/Xcode/MLE/Xcode/MLE/XCode/MLE .... and so on.

On investigation, I found that my personally created /MLE directory within /XCode had a complete copy of all the subdirectories in XCode and the /MLE directory within the copied /XCode had the same again ... and on and on and on.

Now, I may have caused this, but I'm not usually that stupid. I was using /MLE at the time that time machine went haywire and it may have done it. Just killed the copy (which contained about 365,000 files!) and recovered 30GB.

I suggest you check time machine didn't do this to you

Good luck

Tchelyzt wrote:

Hi all,

I think I may have another take on this problem. One evening, my 5 year old MacBook pro slowed to a crawl and devoured 30Gb of my quite small disk. i quickly learned about the local backup (though not why it got it into its head to start that evening) and I disabled it. I never recovered the disk space ...

Local Snapshots won't do that. They're very different from normal backups to an external device; they're not extra copies. What happens is, when you delete things and empty the trash, they're not really deleted, but moved into a hidden database (/.MobleBackups). So you don't gain any space from deleting things, until the last Snapshot is deleted. If your disk gets over 80% full, new snapshots aren't made, and old ones are deleted until it gets back to 80%. Otherwise, they're "thinned" down to one per day after 24 hours, then deleted after a week. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #30 for the gory details.

Today, using spotlight to track down a mislaid file, I discovered it's path seemed to turning back in on itself. The path looked something like

/Xcode/MLE/Xcode/MLE/XCode/MLE .... and so on.

. . .

I suggest you check time machine didn't do this to you

I have no idea what did that, but it wasn't Time Machine. It only deals with external volumes and the hidden /.MobileBackups folder.

Hi everybody,

I had the "disk full" problem, basically it seams that my issue is "memory leak" from an application failieur.

it created Swap files and the memory was not freed, this other post helped:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3221471?start=0&tstart=0

&

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1319798

it seams that in my case it is the flash player. Observing it with Activity Monitor Flash just started out of nothing, and I was losing disk space. I checked the phenomena with OmniDiskSweeper where I could see 1Go swapfiles beeing generated.

After I killed Flash process on Activity Manager the Swapfiles were cleaned, some old remained (they disapear by restart) and the used Swap memory indication from Activity Manager was clearly reduced and I also regained Disk Space (swap files deleted, observed with OmniDiskSweeper).

Also deactivating the local snapshot fom TM gave me 20Go back after restarting. But this was not my issue, reather the memory leak.

I'm still facing dificulties with streaming videos i.e. youtube, it is quite slow (probably related to virtual mamory or RAM). It used to be ok some while ago and I belive the problem started when I updated flash...

after instaling lion i also started to see the hard drive disappearing. it took me a while but the solution for me was to plug external drive into computer, let it back up computer with time machine, it took about 30 minutes, i then restarted computer and when i checked activity monitor over three quarters of disk was again green, got it all back. good luck.

Pondini wrote:

Local Snapshots won't do that.

I have no idea what did that, but it wasn't Time Machine. It only deals with external volumes and the hidden /.MobileBackups folder.

Well I watched it gobble my disk. I forget the process name, a typical unix unpronouncable 4 letter name like mmdt or some such. I search it on the forums and discovered it was time machine doing a local snapshot. I fought it, closing it down and watching it reopen to grab more disk. All the while my machine movong like a snail and almost ignoring my efforts. I finally managed to disable it at a cost of 30GB.

This was certainly going on at precisely the time I lost all that space. I think there's a bug and it managed to put a recursive link into my directory. I wouldn't know how to replicate it.

regards

Then you've got other, much worse, problems. I've not seen anything like that posted here. Some folks have thought something like that was happening, but they all turned out to be something else.

You might have a directory problem; try verifying your internal HD.

There are two processes involved: mtmd (Mobile Time Machine daemon), that makes the snapshots; and mtmfs (Mobile Time Machine File System) that manages them -- deleting as necessary.

Yeah,

mtmd ... that was the gobbler and I'm blaming it for my problems. I have verified my disk; got a clean bill of health. In fact, since I sorted out the recursion, I've no further issues.

The interesting thing is that mtmd left me alone for months and then, one evening, out of the blue, it decided to pick on me. That's the bit I don't get. Why, having never bothered me before, did it self-enable?

Anyhow, would be interested to know if some of the many people reporting missing disk capacity would check whether they have a recursive directory problem.

Tchelyzt wrote:

Yeah,

mtmd ... that was the gobbler and I'm blaming it for my problems.

Can you post the messages from your logs? Use the Console app in your Applications/Utilities folder. Filter for mtmd in the String Matching box.

Most likely, the recursive directory was the actual problem.

Message was edited by: Pondini

after i plugged in external drive and went to time machine and let it back up my computer i forgot to say that i then turned time machine off. after restarting computer the activity monitor indicated disk usage was over three quarters green where before disk usage was over half blue. i didn't do anything else. that was the first time i used time machine since installing lion 2 months ago. mabey just turning off time machine was the trick, dont know but its nice to see lots of green on disk.

rryan2007 wrote:

. . .

that was the first time i used time machine since installing lion 2 months ago. mabey just turning off time machine was the trick, dont know but its nice to see lots of green on disk.

You really should back up more often than every two months!

If something awful happens, you risk losing everything you've done since the last backup. 😟

I just started having this problem a few days ago with my macbook air running lion. I cleared up 72 gb of data from iphoto library and less than 24 hours later, was back to <1gb free in my hard-drive.. This happened while time machine was enabled, and connected to the local backup drive.

I managed to identify the culprit area was the main /username folder which accounted for 192gb of space, but i could only see about 50 gb of space in the visible folders.. i couldn't find any of the hidden local backup folders.

interestingly, the hard drive space only seemed to be diminishing if my computer was connected to the internet, and the mail app was running. I think this may have more to do with the mail app behaviors.

any advice?

mantis689 wrote:

. . .

I managed to identify the culprit area was the main /username folder which accounted for 192gb of space, but i could only see about 50 gb of space in the visible folders.. i couldn't find any of the hidden local backup folders.

No, they're not in your home folder. And are shown separately on the Storage display.

interestingly, the hard drive space only seemed to be diminishing if my computer was connected to the internet, and the mail app was running. I think this may have more to do with the mail app behaviors.

Yes, there are reports of mail attachments taking huge amounts of space.

Look in <home folder>/Library/Mail.

thats how i got gb back on my macbook. i This to happened while time machine was enabled, and connected to the local backup drive. after back up was complete i turned off time machine and disconnected the back up drive. when i went to activity monitor it indicated that lost gb was back. for those of you having problem with lost gb, give this a try. its been a few weeks and have not had problem. Before i used to have the time machine enabled even though i did not have back up drive connected. my suggestion is dont enable time machine till you are ready to back up computer to back up drive and then turn off time machine when done backing up computer.

rryan2007 wrote:

thats how i got gb back on my macbook. i This to happened while time machine was enabled, and connected to the local backup drive. after back up was complete i turned off time machine and disconnected the back up drive. when i went to activity monitor it indicated that lost gb was back.

Something else was going on. Time Machine may use some space on your internal HD for temporary workspace while a backup is in progress, but not otherwise.

If you have a laptop, and are running Lion, Time Machine will make "Local snapshots" on your internal HD (whether the external drive is available or not). Those are shown separately in the "Backups" category of the "Storage" display (but not on the Activity Monitor display).

But the Local Snapshots aren't a problem -- they will be deleted automatically if your disk gets over 80% full. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #30 for the gory details.

my suggestion is dont enable time machine till you are ready to back up computer to back up drive and then turn off time machine when done backing up computer.

That's usually not a good idea. First, you give up the Local Snapshots, so if you're away from your backups, you won't have recent versions of files that have been changed or deleted.

Second, if Time Machine is OFF, it won't send a notice if you go 10 days without doing a backup.