startup disk is full

Start Here

Freeing Disc Space

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html

You may also appreciate this Video...

http://macmost.com/what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html

I have no idea why your startup disk is full, but I will relate what happened to mine in the even that it may help you. I happened to notice, after my grandchildren were on my Mac, that they had tried to send a large Photo Booth video file via my email to their Mom's email. The file was too large and as such the "send" failed. A few days later, I started getting the pop-up indicating my "startup disk was full...", and letting me know I should delete some files ASAP. That was odd, in that I have a 500GB hard drive and had never used more than about 1/5th of it in the past. I started reading "full disk" mysterious issue on this Community Board and found many other with a similar issue which related to recovered mail messages. I had no way to see what apps or folders/files were hogging my Hard Drive so after reading some posts, downloaded a freeware program (disk inventory X). This showed me that my Mail Messages were now occupying approx. 395 GB of my Hard Drive. I tried for quite some time to follow the advice of other folks posts and find and delete the offending files. Many posts told me I should downloaad some other freeware apps that would allow me to see "Hidden Files" on my Mac and thus delete the Recovered Message file. I found another Community Post that told me to select the show hidden folders and files in my Finder, but I couldn't see such a choice. Then I found out if you change "All Files..." and instead select "Other" in the finder choices it will indeed show the hidden folders/files and allow you to delete them if you dare. I was able to find the Recovered Message folder in my Mailbox (USER.>Library>Mail>etc. etc. etc. and then delte the file. I now have over 400GB available on my Hard Drive.

This was extremely helpful to me figuring out my problem. I had the exact same occurence as you! thank you so much I was becoming furious because as i would clean space, literally hrs later it would be occupied by something and I couldn't figure out what it was. THANKS

@Wise JD: Thank you so much mate! It bloody saved me a trip to apple store who would have surely asked to reinstall my OS!

Thanks wiseDJ really help me to solve this problem thanks again

hello, I think somehow I have a similar problem....I am getting those warning messages about startup disc being full, doing major deleting, and then watching the space somehow fill up again. I freed 14 GB of space, and now 20 minutes later it is down to 12. I called Apple Care and the man said he thinks it's a hardware issue, but I think you have the solution. However, I've read your post carefully and I don't understand how to change "all files" to "other.Where are the "finder choices"? I found the finder preferences..

it seems that in this new computer I got in March, everything is hidden in the Library that one used to be able to get to.

I can't find mail downloads, I can't find the data from the pictures in the iphoto....help! thank you...

Hi Elizabeth, You just need to go to the "Finder" then go up to the first pull-down menu and select "Preferences". When that opens you will see another pull-down box that defaults to "open all file" ...if you click on the right side of that pull-down the choices will appear ...the botom choice is "Other". That will show the hidden files as well as those that had shown before under All-Files. At that point you can follow the process that I mentioned in my earlier post and find the mail message that is eating up your disk.

omg thank you! I found a 30 GB folder in there! whew! those apple care people know nothing!

now that I know how to get to the recovered messages I can find the culprit and trash it, but the thing is still growing.....after working on the computer for an hour or so I had to go back and throw it away again, it had reached 7 GB already....do you know how to stop it? thanks!

ps I have kept the recovered messages window open in the finder and just about every 5 minutes a file called A7BDD7BB-B316-44FF-A47C-71A981341D80 fills up with around 500 MB of whatever, so I throw the whole thing away and empty the trash.....keep working, and when I check again, there it is, so I throw it away again...

Hi Elizabeth, Did you...

1. I deleted the hidden folder .OfflineCache" at the following path: "~/Library/Mail/IMAP-@domain.tld@imap.domain.tld/.OfflineCache

2. I deleted the "Recovered Files" Mailbox folder at "~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Recovered Messages ([Gmail Account Name]).mbox

3. restarted Mail and it worked!

The basic problem is that mail is trying over and over again to send recovred mail ...each time it will fail and eat up disk space. This process can gobble up your disk very fast such that you will start getting the disk full message.

actually what I did was restart the macbook air pressing command r (I'd looked that up) which got me to disk utility that could repair the disk rather than just the permissions....that seems to have finally stopped the endlessly reproducing file (so far) 😉 thanks!

spoke too soon, it came back, so I followed your directions....

Thank you for the suggestion. I had the same problem: hundreds of copies of my entire yahoo mailbox in the "failed mail" folder. For those familiar with UNIX, it's easiest to use "Terminal" program in Utilities to quickly find the offening files and delete them. Note that it could be dangerous since you can inandvertently wipe out a chunwsk of your disk. Unfamiliar wth UNIX can slug though the Finder search facility as suggested. When I call Apple, they offered a $250 service plan before taking a look at the issue. They've got to be aware of this problem since it seemed to have persisted for years. My advice is to remove Mail program from your dock and never use it again.