lion eating my hard drive space

I had a 500GB drive which I replaced for a 1TB drive, just before changing the 500GB drive had about 200GB of used space.

After about 1 month the free space on the 1TB drive is now only about 220GB. There is now a huge 580GB of space taken up as "other".

I have tried all the steps mentioned in this tread any similar threads and it stays massively the same.

What does not add up is if I use any of the utilities (with the time machine caches deleted) to see where space is used there is a big difference, the total of all apps, etc is about 200GB, I can not find where this 580GB is??? No tool is showing it....

The problem is I can do a TM backup because my TM now wants 1TB drive to back up the mystery space...a 500GB drive should be fine...

The problem does seem that the os is caching something given the new extra available space....any thoughts would be very welcome...

Update, I just ran the

"

sudo tmutil disablelocal"

Everything is now reported as "Other"....(all apps music etc are all still there!)

Hi rsjm,

Have you checked the size of your Mail folder in your own user library?

tomfer wrote:

. . .

What does not add up is if I use any of the utilities (with the time machine caches deleted) to see where space is used there is a big difference, the total of all apps, etc is about 200GB, I can not find where this 580GB is??? No tool is showing it....

Then the difference is in folders that are hidden or you're not authorized to see.

See Where did my Disk Space go? Be sure you've tried everything else there, then see the green box.

tomfer wrote:

Update, I just ran the

"

sudo tmutil disablelocal"

and more ios magic.....

Everything is now reported as "Other"....(all apps music etc are all still there!)

That display comes from the Spotlight index. If the drive isn't indexed, or the index is damaged/corrupted, you'll get bizarre totals for the categories.

Ignore this aspect for the moment; work your way through Where did my Disk Space go? first.

Hi trevreddevil thanks, yes I checked it...only 5.5GB

Hi Pondini,

Thanks for the advice, I have been through the list, its still the same, I've flushed PRAM, the "about this mac" overview above which went fully in the other category came back to the way it was with the 580GB in Other....I think i went to it too soon after a boot.

What is strange about this is that I add about 500GB of extra disk space and within about a month I have about 500GB of untraceable files on the machine?

I did also search with on of the disk utils whch was looking in admin mode..

tomfer wrote:

Hi Pondini,

Thanks for the advice, I have been through the list,

Then please post a screenshot of the Whatsize window in Admin Mode (similar to the one in the green box inWhere did my Disk Space go?)

Tomfer, I have spotlight off allways (I use Find-Any-File and Easyfind instead): and then this Storage Tab allways displays the storage as "other" (yellow). Pondini said already that it is the Spotlight Index. Don't worry about that.

Podini,

I had made a rookie error with whatsize, actaully it looks like when i made the restore from the orignal 500GB disk to the new 1TB, that something has happened that I now have repeating user folders, the sub floders are marker in finder as no assessable (wth the red tag) I guess these are the old user folders TM put onto the disk and are safe to delete.

Somehow, you've restored or copied the Users folder inside your home folder! Just delete it.

Hi, I'm having the same issue and would like like to point out that within var/log I have two kernal.log files taking up an enormous amount of space: kernal.log.2 is 64.46 gigs and kernel.log.3 is 60.2 gigs. what are these used for? can I delete them? I do not use Time Machine (use GetBackup2 to an external drive instead) and my mail folder is under 5 gigs. thanks.

Yes, you can safely delete those.

Their size is an indication of problems, however, probably with some hardware or a kernel extension (the kernel is the basic, underlying part of OSX. It's sort of the "traffic cop" for your entire system).

Take a look at the current kernel.log file. While most of what you see there appears to be gibberish, look for the same or similar messages repeated over and over. Copy and post a representative sample in a new thread. Someone will be able to decipher it.

Will do - Many thanks, Pondini!

Can you re-write this for laymen? This issue has basically rendered my computer uselss.