Time Machine causing my system drive to fill up

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Level 1

8 points

Time Machine causing my system drive to fill up

I really don't know what's happening!

I turned on Time Machine agian after having it off for a month or so. It ran a new back up (whch took almost 12 hours) and all seemed normal. But now, whenever it runs an hourly back up, my system drive gets filled up with something - I don't know what - until it has zero space left!

I can't tell what it's doing or what files have been stuck onto my system drive. If I could tell that, I'd remove them.

So I have two qusetions:

First, what is happening with my system drive? The only thing I've changed is turning on Time Machine. Why would it transfer files to my system drive instead of (or in addition to) storing backups on my backup drive? (The BU drive is a Western Digital 2TB)

Second, is there any way I can determine what files have been added to my system drive to make it fill all the way up? Is there some way to search by a criteria of "files saved to system drive in the last day"?

Please help, it's making my computer useless!

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jul 5, 2012 12:54 AM

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Answer 1

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BDAqua

Level 10

239,183 points

Jul 5, 2012 10:19 AM in response to joemax93

Hi Joe, I suspect the external is disconnecting itself or such.

In Finder's Menu, select Go menu>Go to Folder, and go to "/volumes". (no quotes)

Volumes is where an alias to your hard drive ("/" at boot) is placed at startup, and where all the "mount points" for auxiliary drives are created for you to access them. This folder is normally hidden from view.

Drives with an extra 1 on the end have a side-effect of mounting a drive with the same name as the system already think exists. Try trashing the duplicates with a 1 or 2 if there are no real files in them, and reboot.

If it does contain data...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2474

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Answer 2

joemax93 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 5, 2012 11:36 AM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for your quick response, BDAqua - OK, here's new information!

After shutting down, powering down all the external drives and rebooting it all, the system drive came back with all of the supposedly "added data" mysteriously gone! The boot drive had been showing "zero space available" but after reboot it showed 10 gigs of available space (which is the expected amount.)

So for some reason the OS was reporting that the system drive was full (I got the warning message saying there is almost no space left on the boot drive) even though in reality it was not full.

Do you have any idea what might cause this glitch in reporting? As I say, the only thing I did before this problem came up was to turn on Time Machine. I don't want to turn Time Machine back on until I know what's happening.

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Answer 3

joemax93 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 5, 2012 11:44 AM in response to BDAqua

Oh, BTW, when I looked at the root "/volumes" directory, there were no duplicates of my connected drives, but there were names of thumb drives I use (which are not connected) and also a old drive name for which the drive no longer exists. There were no files in their directories, so I trashed them. This may explain whay I sometimes had trouble getting thumb drives to unmount.

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Answer 4

BDAqua

Level 10

239,183 points

Jul 5, 2012 11:57 AM in response to joemax93

Oh boy Joe, what Apple doesn't tell you is that 10 GB of free disk space is not enough AND isn't free for your use, and in my experience 10.5.8 will be sluggish with less than 30 GB free, higher OS versions needing even more.

Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?

How much RAM & free space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.

In the Memory tab, are there a lot of Pageouts?