Strange disk space oddity in OS X Mountain Lion?

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Strange disk space oddity in OS X Mountain Lion?

Hello fellow Mac users,

After using mountain lion yesterday, my disk space reads 95.45GB. After awaking the mac from sleep today, i suddenly have only have 74.76GB available. I have Sophos anti-virus installed and its icon was missing from the menu bar. I checked the disk space utilization and most of that newly claimed space came from the other category. I restarted the mac and and the everything was normal again.

Has anyone encountered such an issue.

Thank you for your assistance.

OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Jul 28, 2012 8:55 AM

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Answer 1

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MAMneo Author

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Jul 29, 2012 7:31 AM in response to MAMneo

I had the same issue again and checked the activity monitor to see that the systemuiserver process was taking over 20GB in virtual memory space. Once it was restarted the disk space lost was gradually reclaimed.

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Answer 2

Jul 29, 2012 8:15 AM in response to MAMneo

You should not need any "Antivirus", they are mostly gimmicks to invade your computer or get you to buy something you don't need. There aren't any Apple viruses and never have been, contrary to the shrieks of Apple detractors. Just keep your software up-to-date and remove that antivirus junk.

About the restart, in all likelihood your virus software (which sounds like a virus in itself) leaked memory while sleeping no less, and eventually crashed. Yes, 10.8 wakes up every 2 hours to perform necessary actions, a new feature. The memory (virtual memory stored at /private/var/vm) took up 20 gigs of space which was dumped onto the disk overnight. When you rebooted the memory dump was was wiped clean.

I hope you enjoy your Mac.

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Answer 3

MAMneo Author

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Jul 29, 2012 8:29 AM in response to Gnarlodious

Thank you for your perspective on the issue. After some more tinkering. I explicitly put the mac to sleep through the menu rather than closing my lid as i had before and enountered no disk space leak issues or the sophos icon disappearing.

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Answer 4

Jul 29, 2012 8:38 AM in response to MAMneo

Ah yes, there are certain applications that can prevent the OS from sleeping while they are working with the lid closed. Personally, I think its a bug and a fire hazard. Thanks for the info on Sophos.

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Answer 5

Wubupon

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Jul 29, 2012 9:58 AM in response to MAMneo

Whenever this happens, it means that there are corrupted files on your computer. Fortunately there is a solution...hurray... Go to Applications/Utility/Diskutility, select your Macintosh HD drive, and click repair permissions. Also, click verify disk. If it spots any problems, it will tell you to repair the disk. In order to do this, you must start the computer in "repair" mode. Do this by restarting the computer and as soon as you hear the apple chime booonnnng thingy, press and hold "command+r". then when the option screen comes up, select disk utility. In disk utility, select Macintosh HD again, but this time, click "Repair Disk". That should fix the problem.

(You can also access your repair disk by holding the "option" key at startup. It will give you an option of which hard drive you want to start from. The repair disk would be the one that ISNT "macintosh HD", just pressing Command+R at start up is easier though.

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Answer 6

MAMneo Author

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Jul 29, 2012 10:56 AM in response to Wubupon

Thanks for the tip. No major issues but it reported the message "warning SUID file..ARDAgent has been modified and will not be repaired". I saw the issue referenced on the apple support pages and they state its not a message of concern but i wanted to know how other people handled this.

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